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therefore, “indentured laborours” who toiled in the phosphate mines (31). After
detailing something of its early history, Dennis provides a rich and vibrant
account of Christmas Island as it was in July 2005 when she arrived and began
her anthropological and ethnographic research program there.
In “The More Than Human World of Christmas,” Chapter 2, Dennis notes
that natural evolution “on the island proceeded in isolation, creating the
conditions for unique animal and plant forms, which armed by sea or air over
the 10 million years the island lay undisturbed, to arise and flourish” (63). The
red crabs featured on the unforgettable cover of Christmas Island: An
Anthropological Study receive evocative description here as creatures that
are ubiquitous, unique, endemic, and red. They are fire engine,
scarlet, ripe-tomato, fresh-blood red—unadulterated, bright,
clear rubicund. Their carapaces are slicked with almost
impossible sheen and luminescent luster after rain, during
which they emerge jewel-like from cool burrows in order to
deftly collect and then delicately drink rain water from their
large and powerful claws (69).
Without question, this passage demonstrates what Dennis means by the
“sensual” as it colored her experiences of—and subsequent writing about—
Christmas Island. In its excess, the experience and the writing are almost
Romantic in the very best sense.
Chapter 3, “Staying and Moving in Local Places,” directs attention to “how
it is that locals become locals on Christmas Island and how the neighbourhoods
in which they are produced have come to be as they are” (85). Not unexpectedly,
perhaps, given its British heritage, early neighborhoods on Christmas Island
“reflected the dominance of European habits over the island terrain,” a
dominance which, in true, 21s' century, postcolonial fashion, is diminishing
slowly as the multicultural ethnicity of the island’s inhabitants continues to
assert itself in various and sundry forms (85-86). On Christmas Island, being (or
becoming) a local “is something far too ordinary for words, which is why the
state of being local is generally left unarticulated” by its inhabitants (106). The
idea of locality, in this case, involves the
movement in constancy, and there is ongoing movement in the
apparent stasis accorded to ho me [that] comes from an
ongoing sensual engagement with the sites of home in the
ordinary work of creating and maintaining families,
organisations, neighbourhoods, and persons and their places,
homes, and memories (107).
The specificity of the consideration of what it means to be a local on Christmas
Island seems applicable to almost any other place in the world. (And perhaps it