Christmas Island:
An Anthropological Study
Simone Dennis
Cambria Press, 2008
A gorgeous yet, at the same time, slightly menacing, photograph of
numerous red crabs making their way along a verdant earthen floor serves as the
compelling cover art for Simone Dennis’s intriguing and informative new
monograph, Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study.
An entire slew of enigmatic questions informs Dennis’s work in Christmas
Island: An Anthropological Study. These range from, “What is it like to live in a
place that is administered by Australia, yet is located much closer to
Indonesia?,” to “What does it mean to say you are a native of a place in which
your ancestors arrived as migrants as late as 1950?,” and “What is it like to live
in a place that has more crustacean inhabitants than human ones?” (xvii). Dennis
also notes, significantly, that Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study is the
first book of its kind within the “discipline of anthropology to ethnographically
explore Christmas Island and its people, who are mainly of Australian, Chinese,
and Malay descent” (xvii). Thus Dennis puts forth an ambitious and original
agenda for her study.
Furthermore, Dennis is greatly concerned with the phenomenon of what she
calls movement on Christmas Island, and considers this aspect from four
different angles: 1) “the distinctive animals that Christmas Island is famous for
and how the movements they make on, to, and from the island are brought into
human lives to make sense of things and events that occur on Christmas Island,”
2) that “which local people undertake in their enduring stay in specific
neighborhoods on Christmas Island” in order to determine “how it is to be, and
to be recognized as, a Christmas Island local,” 3) “the sensually and
geographically specific experiences that neighborhood locals have of Christmas
Island,” and, finally, 4) the shift “between Christmas Island and other places in
the world” (xviii-xxvi).
Following an “Introduction” in which Dennis lays out more fully the plan of
Christmas Island: An Anthropological Study, are the book’s six discrete
chapters. Chapter 1, “An Ethnographic Introduction to Christmas Island, Indian
Ocean, Australia,” describes Christmas Island quite vividly as “a mere
cartographic speck in the Indian Ocean between Java Head and Antarctica,” and
as a place where heat and humidity predominate as weather conditions (27-28).
Though undoubtedly observed by seafarers for centuries prior, Christmas Island
was not settled by humans until the late 1880s and would go on to become a
prominent source of mined phosphate of lime which, when properly treated,
metamorphosed into an exceptional—and highly sought after—form of plant
food (29). Not surprisingly, perhaps, many of the island’s original settlers were,