[Anthropgrad] Anthropology seminar Wednesday 20 August

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology Seminar, 9.30 am Wednesday 20 August, Seminar Room A, Coombs

Simone Dennis, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, ANU

'Of red crabs and yellow perils: life in the migration exclusion zone,
Christmas Island, Australia'

Christmas Island has been referenced in media and scholarly observations,
where it is positioned as an important stage upon which particular events of
national interest were played out.  Some also know Christmas Island in and
through the many documentary films that have take as subjects the island¹s
natural wonders, its avian marvels, and its iconic red crab population. But
there is very little in the way of the social history and contemporary lives
of the Christmas Islanders themselves and, until the production of my own
monograph, no ethnographic attention had been paid to Christmas Island.
Events-based coverage of the Tampa crisis, as well as occurrences such as
the annual migration of the island¹s millions of red crabs from the forest
to the sea, are highlighted as dramatic moments, and come for outsiders to
stand metonymically for the life of the island.  Both sorts of events ­ the
coming of persons into the nation, and the movement of red crabs ­ are
constancies of life for Christmas Islanders, and in this paper I seek to
draw attention to the constancies of animal and human movement that
characterise life in this place.
More specifically, this paper explores the ways in which iconic animals are
involved in the maintenance and the articulation of a sense of community on
Christmas Island, as well as the ways in which they have been involved in
historical divisions of marked ethnic settlement.  It is also concerned with
how particular animals are drawn into metaphors by islanders to understand
and describe the movement of human arrivals into island space.
 
____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/

Information about the Master of Visual Culture Research
is available at: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/vcr.php