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These groups have imposed peculiar rhythms, tastes, patterns of worship, and patterns of movement on particular parts of the island, and these rhythms, tastes, smells, patterns of worship, and patterns of movement happen in the shadows of the distinctive built environs of the island. The ethnoarchitechtural evidences of being in each of the three distinctive island neighbourhoods are not simply the outcomes of particular ethnic presence on particular parts of the island; the built neighbourhoods are the continually evolving results of neighbourhood labours. Appadurai’s (1995) work drew attention to the ongoing labour entailed in the production of the locale, and, in the present work, I take these insights and apply them to the built peculiarities of Christmas Island neighbourhoods.
These neighbourhoods originally took material form in the context of a European dominated phosphate mining enterprise. Recently, in the context of the island’s fraught and racist labour history, a purposeful resignification of the built manifestations of social life on Christmas Island occurred. The main task of this resignification was to change the memories embedded in the material features of neighbourhoods, to effectively consign their pasts to the past, in order to make way for a more equitable future. Richard Terdiman (1985) and Nadia Seremetakis (1994, 1996) pointed to the ways in which memories are lodged in materials and how this lodgement might be one that serves to amplify a particular version of the past at the expense of other versions of the past. Material memories are flexible and can be reworked—they move—and this flexibility also speaks to the incompleteness of neighbourhoods on Christmas Island and to the folly of understanding built places as the completed material outcomes of living. Instead, buildings, especially in this ethnographic context, call forth and are simultaneously produced by the particular habits that characterise certain neighbourhoods. Paying attention to the habits and the labours that are involved in staying in a neighbourhood over time reveals that staying in one place actually entails a good deal of moving and a lot of work. On Christmas Island, after Casey’s (1996) insight, staying in place actually entails moving in certain, localised ways therein.