| Sumario: | This article takes up the idea of Indian Ocean ‘natural logics’ while shifting attention from ‘cultures of trade’ to leisure culture, and from monsoon winds to waves. Surfers who ride these bands of moving energy describe the experience as one of being ‘stoked’, and the search for stoke has over the past century propelled them around the world ocean in pursuit of the perfect wave. Focusing on the Indian Ocean arena, the article traces three distinct yet not necessarily sequential waves of surf travel therein: the ‘surfari’ and the concealment/exposure of secret spots; enclaves of consumption in the offshore coliseum; and, the swirling shore-break in which the energy parcel conveyed through the ocean is unloaded on the coast. In the process, it explores what insights Indian Ocean studies bring to cultural histories of surfing and how surfing practice has been reshaped as it moves out of its traditional Pacific – and then Atlantic – locations, along with the ways in which surfing has in turn reconfigured the Indian Ocean littoral. The article concludes by shifting mode from critical commentary in order to present the shore-break as a dynamic concept-metaphor for materializing immersed and energised scholarship.
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