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Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 177–201

Chapter 7
Utu as epistemology and conviviality in Kiswahili culture

Anthropological linguistic perspectives on living together

| University of Cologne
| Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Anthropological linguistics is essentially concerned with language in/as cultural practices as they emerge and change through humans living in communities. Yet the aspect of living together itself has rarely been explicitly addressed from anthropological linguistic perspectives. In our contribution, we aim to explore the concept of utu (‘humanity’) in Kiswahili by looking at linguistic practices in different domains. To show that utu can be regarded as an epistemology and a way of knowing and mastering living together as humans, we will look at language in unyago (coming-of-age rituals), proverbs and sayings but also at grammatical features of Kiswahili. This chapter thus investigates concepts of humanity at the intersection of language and culture.

Keywords: humanity, proverbs, cultural knowledge, morality, ritual, conceptualization, reciprocal
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Proverbs and sayings
  • 3.Unyago
  • 4.The linguistics of expressing utu
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Interviews
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.07bru
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