This article considers what might be meant by Swahili cultures and Swahili identities. It regards neither concept as fixed, but as constituting a repertoire from which people choose strategically, depending not only upon location and historical time, but also upon social context. The processes of constituting cultures and identities are part of the making of meaning, a process in which, as will be seen, there are important continuities, ruptures and contradictions. With its attention to detail and its ability to give voice to the local, ethnography plays an important role in understanding the construction of both cultures and identities. In this paper, ethnographic examples are drawn both from my own fieldwork on Mafia Island, Tanzania, begun in 1965, and from the work of other anthropologists and scholars who have carried out research on the East African coast and islands.

This article considers what might be meant by Swahili cultures and Swahili identities. It regards neither concept as fixed, but as constituting a repertoire from which people choose strategically, depending not only upon location and historical time, but also upon social context. The processes of constituting cultures and identities are part of the making of meaning, a process in which, as will be seen, there are important continuities, ruptures and contradictions. With its attention to detail and its ability to give voice to the local, ethnography plays an important role in understanding the construction of both cultures and identities. In this paper, ethnographic examples are drawn both from my own fieldwork on Mafia Island, Tanzania, begun in 1965, and from the work of other anthropologists and scholars who have carried out research on the East African coast and islands.

In the last two decades, Swahili chronicles have been thoroughly re-evaluated by historians of the East African coast, and their usefulness as historical sources subject to serious doubt and criticism. Typical of this new attitude were the words of Gill Shepherd: `Such chronicles are less objective histories than annotated pedigrees of a single ruling lineage`. Given such a perspective, the question may be asked whether the chronicles are a suitable guide to the search for historical identities of coastal societies.

In conversation, participants operate under the condition that they must demonstrate to each other what they assume to be the nature of their talk. This happens on a sequential basis. Every turn in conversation is typically followed by another one, and therefore it is paramount for the second turn in line, for its own intelligibility, to make clear how it relates to the preceding turn. In this way, by tracing the interpretations that are made `available´ by the participants themselves as they assemble their talk, one can obtain a technical specification from within of the procedures conversationalists use for eo-constructing their encounter. This approach to the study of talk and interaction, heavily influenced by Harold Garfinkel´s (1967) ethnomethodological program, became known as Conversation Analysis (CA). This paper, then, is an attempt to reconceptualize the notion of institutionality in CA. At the same time, because it uses real conversational materials for doing so, it contains a substantive analysis of some of the procedures and situated practices the people in the sample resort to for accomplishing their interaction.