One of the goals of experimental ethnography is to illuminate the unique historical, social and political situation of a people from their own multi-faceted perspectives. As part of the effort to reach this goal, ethnographers are learning to listen to what members of the society under study have to say about themselves and about their place in the world. This study argues that folklore - traditional aesthetic culture - is of central importance to the new ethnography. It is by becoming cultured in a people's traditional art forms that the ethnographer can come closest to an unmediated hearing of the individual voices of community members and to an understanding of how commmunity "affect" is shaped and shared rhetorically. She contends that traditional verbal art does more than reflect a culture from its members' points of view: it is one of the means by which members comment upon change, and recreate their culture. It is also a powerful resource through which they respond to the ethnographer and what the ethnographer represents. Drawing on over five years of field research conducted between 1967 and 1987, Webber offers insights into the community of Kelibia, a town on the northeastern coast of Tunisia, gained through the study of its folk communicative resources and especially through study of the hikayah, a colloquial Arabic verbal art genre that resembles the western genres of local history or personal experience narrative. She demonstrates that Kelibians draw upon hikayat to cope creatively with both the destabilizing and the energizing facets of centuries of frequent, rarely controlled or invited, contact with outsiders.