Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study By Simone Dennis

The third quality of movement is one that issues from the sensually and geographically specific experiences that neighbourhood locals have of Christmas Island. While it might now be the norm for people of any ethnic descent to wander into eateries located in any neighbourhood, and while it might now be the case that grand, old former mine administrator mansions are not staffed with servants, the neighbourhoods are still distinctive in their habits and in what their members do. Looking into the distinctive sorts of movements that locals make in specific neighbourhood contexts involves looking closely at the sensual worlds that are characteristic of each neighbourhood and how people mark, and are marked by, the Christmas Island sensorium in and through moving about within particular neighbourhood places. Being in different neighbourhoods on Christmas Island gives people access to different sensual experiences, and people who call themselves locals, and who are called that by other people, stay and move on the island in sensually and geographically truncated arcs that weave in and through local places. The peculiar quality of this movement and the sensual worlds it takes in and leaves out are key elements in determining who is and who is not local on Christmas Island in and on local terms. Locals are people who are at home in these arcs, which are characterised by a certain truncation of localised movement.

Being at home in the very act of moving reverses traditional anthropological notions of home and makes a nod in the direction of movement as a feature of both the condition of the contemporary world and the conceptual apparatus we apply to understand it. In traditional anthropology, the notion of home has been one characterised by the strictness of fixity (cf., Strathern, 1981). The practices of movement, such as the kinds to which Casey (1996) drew attention, as well as to the motions that have sent populations across the world and away from homelands, has unsettled this notion in certain ways. Rapport and Dawson (1998) noted that the encapsulation of persons within geographic bounds, called localities, is not a relevant way of carving up the social world in many contemporary contexts (p. 4). Gupta and Ferguson (1997) noted that anthropological notions of the field have reified such concrete notions of locales (p. 4).

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