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The tension between substantive and qualifier, which is also that between generality and particularism, between thing-in-itself and its subjective phenomenology, between the human and its individual, personal, and ethnical manifestations, is a route to possible experiential and methodological wholeness. One keeps both in mind, in one’s writing, without alighting finally anywhere.
Hence, Dennis’ endeavour to present us with what she dubs an ‘adjectivally rich’ anthropology which mimics the adjectival narratives of her participants. Insofar, as the adjectival makes sense only with reference to a substantive, the anthropologist writes a continuous movement between the two in an effort to do justice to the continuing complexities of the human experiential whole.
Nietzsche (1878/1994, p. 125) posited movement as the only immortal fact in human experience (the only immortality in the world). In Christmas Island experience, according to Dennis, this is at least partially, adjectivally, appreciated. Movement is everywhere and is widely acknowledged. Movement thus provides the book with a highly significant trope; different kinds of movement provide the structure for the ethnographic account. There is the movement of asylum seekers; the movement of crabs, migrating birds, and fish; the movement of locals within and between neighbourhoods along habitual paths and tracks that measure the truncated arcs of everyday social interaction; the movement of pregnant women to hospitals off of the island; and the movement of local émigrés to new homes in Perth and Katanning.
At the same time, the body provides a kind of resting place, however temporary, however illusory. The body is our substantive—the locus of our moving experiences and memories. Its substantial sensual capacities provide us with our human and individual ability to recognise and to respond to the possibilities of and for movement in the world. So here is a further paradox: movement known by the senses of a body, which is a site of movement, and whose consciousness of movement is a key component in its continuing, reflexive constitution, personal and social, of itself.