The discussion begins with an introduction to some of the islands of the Indian Ocean region and an overview of stories in these island societies. Listening to sense, a local, sense-embedded and self-reflexive anthropologist, may be uniquely positioned to hear and see, feel and taste the violence of encounter. Specifically, I propose that a grounded and reflexive listening practice may reveal that stories are multisensory and locally embedded devices that help us to take hold of the “ethnographic ear” (Clifford and Marcus Citation1986) and render audible the specificities of the colonial encounter. The notion of sense-work is proposed to bring the senses (back) in. Research in the “ethnography of speaking” has drawn attention to the significance of social context (“traditional,” colonial, postcolonial, etc.), but, on account of its verbocentrism, tended to deflect attention from sensory context. savouring the “sweetness” of a tale), not just the ears, particularly in the context of face-to-face story-telling, such as we will be exploring here (Bendix Citation2000). Footnote 1 Stories are (potentially) addressed to all the senses, even taste (e.g. Citation2012), which calls for sense- work. Put another way, story-telling is at once a social activity and “sense-making activity” (Vannini et al.
In practice, listening to a story entails attending to the “interconnection” of the senses, no less than experiencing the “interconnections” between storyteller and audience (Finnegan Citation2014). This narrative imperative is also a sensuous imperative that is, while story-telling is (obviously) a form of “verbal communication”, it just as fundamentally involves “nonverbal communication” (e.g. The islanders say that stories “sweeten” life, that every story “has its place” and “must be recounted”. Men and women, old and young relish humorous, poignant, clever and articulate stories. Stories pervade social life among African descendants in the Indian Ocean region (IOR) (Haring Citation2004).
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