ABSTRACT
Introduction On beaches and in backyards around the world, children dig holes to China. On afternoons at Brighton Beach on the southern coast of England, at Brighton Beach on Coney Island in New York, and at Brighton-le-Sands in Sydney, China is the promised or threatened destination if they dig deep enough. China is antipodal to these children regardless of where they begin to burrow. It’s only a daydream, but if it were possible to tunnel holes through the earth’s core, none of the young people would end up in China. The English child would come up southeast of New Zealand in the Southern Pacifi c Ocean; the young New Yorker would emerge southwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean; and the Australian would surface west of Morocco in the Atlantic. On the other hand, a Chinese child, digging furiously from Beijing, would appear northwest of Viedma, Argentina, which is south of Buenos Aires. 1
The passageway to China is a fantasy of geographical dualism, but it indicates how diffi cult it is to think about the other side of the earth (not that the earth has sides) and about presumed geographical opposites that turn out to be not quite so opposite. Indeed, the diffi culty of imagining the largest community-a global one-in this way almost invariably attends the idea of the antipodes, a misapprehension that has a long history. One way to begin to explore this disorientation is by considering the etymology of the word antipodes. The meaning of the Greek word αντίποδες, fi rst recorded in Plato’s Timaeus, is “opposite feet,” a plural noun that designates a relative place. It signifi es those who at any moment happen to be standing on the opposite side of the earth. 2 The Oxford English Dictionary, with uncharacteristic ambivalence, defi nes antipodes as “Places on the surfaces of the earth directly opposite to each other, or the place which is directly opposite to another.” 3 This plurality and relativity suggest some of the diffi culties in locating global counterparts.
