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One of the interesting things about paying attention to boundary crossing in the context of animal-human relationships is that it reveals that the bodies of humans and animals are not necessarily opposed. Animal bodies are often read in the terms of human bodily behaviour, attitude, feeling, and intelligence. Human bodies can be read in animal terms too. Animal creator figures, reincarnation, and the appearance of animal-human tricksters, those who can change or switch between human and animal forms or who otherwise inhabit both categories at once, all reveal human and animal bodies as manifestations of life that do not necessarily belong to opposite domains (Howell, 1996; Rival, 1996).
On Christmas Island, animals are brought into relationships with personal and social being through particular sorts of food taboos, food procurement techniques, and in and through special languages and metaphors. In relationships between human hunters and animal prey, theoreticians, like Bird-David (1990), Brightman (1993), and Morris (1998), have stressed that there is a great and broad diversity of ideas about animals, and not all ideas make utilitarian sense, nor are they always stable. In studies involving pastoralists, decisions about relationships involving animals are not always, or exclusively, about careful attendance to economics or food security (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). Other analysts paid attention to the ways in which animals have been brought into the realm of food; Vialles (1994) asked, in a structuralist approach to abattoirs, what, in fact, meat is, and how it is that meat is differentiated from animal (i.e., the social act of eating beef is different from eating a cow and indicates that some conceptual difference is drawn between the animal and its dead flesh).
On Christmas Island, food taboos around animals are crucial in the ways that local Cocos Malay people are understood to be natives of the island. Their (and other Muslim Malay) practices of crab avoidance, made on the grounds that crabs inhabit two worlds, sea and land, along with afflictions of crab sickness, mark Malay people as particularly and peculiarly related to the native animal inhabitants of the island. It is partly through these relationships that Cocos Malays are accorded a deeper and greater belongingness to Christmas Island. Parker (2006), Noske (2005), and Franklin (2006) paid attention to the ways in which the relationships that people have with native animals sometimes mark a deeper belongingness to place than is available to others without such claims. Cornwall (2005) looked closely at the ways in which the relationships that Australian Indigenes have with native animals help articulate a claim to place that is unavailable to non-Indigenes, that is vested in the very core of place itself.