English, I suspect, leads us down some linguistic garden paths when used to discuss name categories. In Iñupiaq, for instance, one can only ask kiña atiñ? Who is your name? Although one may ask, “suna una?” (what is that?) in reference to things, “suna atiñ?” (what is your name?) is a non-question. The response, “uvaanga Qimmieluk,” translates literally as “I, Qimmieluk.”

The question “Who is your name?” and the answer, “I, Qimmieluk,” offer us a framework – on which I shall build over the next pages – that allows us to examine several notions. The first is that the power of recognition and the power of speech are crucial aspects of naming. On the North Slope, both recognition and speaking personal names are instituted positively; in other contexts the potential dangerous power of both may be marked through avoidance. Lest we be tempted to interpret this purely in discursive terms, this chapter explores the extent to which the power of both speech and recognition are linked in important respects to the who of the name itself. The who of the name, I then suggest, not only implies identity but also sociality that may potentially exist well beyond the immediate universe of the name holder.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; Rose Macaulay, if called by her parents Gladys, would have been the same person and written the same books; a deity by any other name might remain as terrifying, loving, unpredictable, or as some Hindus and Malagasy say, as fragrant (Malg. Andriamañitry). But flowers, persons, and deities are not the same order of phenomena. Roses – despite the multiplication of varieties as the logic of commodities usurps natural selection – are roses, and – despite the intensive labor and exposure to toxic chemicals now necessary to make them flourish – are roses. Persons are somewhat more complex referents than roses and both require and resist being named. Deities, although often usefully understood as persons, are not the same as existential human beings. How different is the importance of a deity or spirit's name to its identity? In this paper I explore the question, drawing on the ethnography of spirit possession found among Malagasy speakers of Mayotte and northwest Madagascar.

The spirits in question engage in long-term relationships with specific human hosts and rise periodically to speak and act through them (Lambek 1981, 1993, 2002). During moments of active possession, which can last up to several hours, hosts are in a state of trance (or dissociation), said to be temporarily absent from or out of control of their bodies.

INTRODUCTION

The high profile of names and naming systems (“onomastics”) is a distinctive hallmark of the ethnographic literature on lowland South America. Names were typically excluded from anthropological research on kinship – witness textbooks on the subject – but when it came to the complex social structures of the Gê and Bororo or the Kariera-like section systems of the Panoans, relations predicated on the transfer of names turned out to be of crucial significance. Following pioneering work on these groups, most monographs on lowland Amerindians now include a section on onomastics and some are entirely devoted to the topic.

In an influential comparative survey, Viveiros de Castro has suggested that Amerindian naming systems can be ranged along a continuum from the “exonymic” to the “endonymic.” In the exonymic systems of the Ikpeng and Yanomamö or the Araweté and other Tupi-speaking groups, names come from without and from others: the gods, the dead, enemies, or animals. In the endonymic systems of the Gê-speaking Kayapó and Timbira, names are conserved as heirlooms within the group, make up part of its corporate property and identity, and designate particular social relations. Furthermore, for the exonymic Tupinambá, the emphasis was on the individual, heroic acquisition of singular and never-to-be-repeated names, which set the bearer apart while, for the endonymic Kayapó, the emphasis is on collectively sanctioned and ceremonialized inter-vivos transmission that keeps a limited stock of names in perpetual circulation.

NAMING AND PUBLIC SPEECH IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA

“Why can't you just call yourself African Indians?” asked the then president-elect Thabo Mbeki in May 1999 at a meeting with self-styled community leaders drawn from the so-called “Indian community” in Durban. The meeting was held at a beachfront hotel a few weeks before the general elections in 1999 and Mbeki's entourage consisted of a high-powered group of ANC ministers and advisers, many of them of Indian origin. ANC leaders hoped that the meeting could provide a breakthrough among the economically important and resourceful Indians in the city, a group that largely had turned its back on the ANC since the early 1990s.

After having listened to what his advisers dismissed as “perceptions, not rooted in facts,” Mbeki lost his patience with what he saw as a privileged group of people, wanting an unambiguous public recognition in the post-apartheid order but only as Indians. Mbeki continued: “If you called yourself African Indians it would make a major difference in how you are perceived. In this way you'd say to your fellow South Africans, ‘this is my country, I am an African first, but I am also an Indian because my forefathers came here to work.’ …. What is, after all, wrong with being an African?”

Mbeki's remarks were clearly informed by the broader project of an “African Renaissance” which he has made his trademark through high-profile conferences and nebulous rhetoric.

INTRODUCTION

Anthropologists often examine naming systems in relation to building the social, naming as a way of making connections between groups. The relation between individual persons and their names is less often studied and it is this that I shall focus on here. A moment's consideration of ethnography reveals that we are not dealing with “a relation” but with a triangulation, that is, the complex field of interactive practices between those who confer and use a name, the person named, and the connotations of name itself. The literature on naming is in broad general agreement that conferring a name (on someone or something) is a performative act that involves a subject-constituting power and takes place within a wider field of conventions and ideological relations (Austin 1962; Bourdieu 1993; Hanks 1993). One might infer that the subsequent speaking out of this name simply partakes in the authoritative aura of this initial act of definition (Althusser 1971). Yet, as the Mongolian case shows, the practices of name-usage are situational, creative and playful. Located within the triangulation just mentioned we find situations of avoidance of naming, of disguise, mimesis, emulation, mockery, and self-protection, in which particular instances throw into sharp relief the relations between the self, one's name, and the external “society” of others.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the processes whereby names have an active presence for persons' sense of selfhood.

Taher Ben Jelloun's novel L'enfant de sable (1985) familiarized us with biological females who are given male names and brought up as boys. In the novel, after his wife gives birth to several girls, a man decides that regardless of one of the children's anatomical features, it will grow up as a boy. The “boy,” Ahmad, has a faked circumcision ceremony arranged for him, and he marries a crippled girl. His “true” sex is revealed only after his death. Ben Jelloun describes the horrific scene when the corpse washers, on discovering that he is a “woman,” leave the house screaming. It is only then that Ahmad's sisters find out that they never had a “brother.” The novel's message is that gendering by way of calling people names was ultimately challenged on the man's deathbed.

I begin with Ben Jelloun's novel because it alludes to the old question about the constitutive power of names, which has occupied philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1977, 1978). More recently, social scientists have raised questions about how subjects are brought into existence and classified through speech acts such as naming. For example, according to Bourdieu, the “act of naming [is] a specifically social judgment of attribution which assigns to the person involved everything that is inscribed in a social definition.”

PROLOGUE: NAMES OF THE FATHER

In April 1999, in the course of a conference on “Race in 21st Century America” held at Michigan State University, I attended an acrimonious public debate staged between Dinesh D'Souza, the author of The End of Race? and the African American political scientist Manning Marable. Marable argued for the uniquely oppressive character of African American experience in the United States, past and present; D'Souza, predictably enough, was there to reiterate his argument that too much fuss is made about racial inequality in America and African Americans should just get on with helping themselves. It was a bad-tempered affair, and in the end Marable sought to clinch the argument by reaching, not for the carefully marshaled evidence with which he had opened the debate, but for personal testimony. He chose, in fact, to speak about naming, and about his name in particular. He was, he told the audience, called Marable because his great-grandfather, a slave, had been sold as a small boy of nine to a man called Marable, sold by the master who was also his father, with his mother weeping by his side. The point of the story was clear: that the injuries of the African American past were so grievous that there could be no comparison with even the harshest of immigrant experiences.

While this volume has been in preparation, we have discovered that if you scratch an anthropologist, you are likely to find a paper on names clambering for attention. In the autumn of 1999, ten anthropologists met for two days at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to talk about names and naming. Our institutional affiliations were international and our fieldwork experience spanned many regions across the globe. We asked what a focus on names and naming might bring to current anthropological thinking and we asked how recent developments in anthropology and beyond might shed new light on our understanding of names and naming more generally.

It was an exhilarating experience, as has been the genesis of this book. Seven of the original workshop participants have contributed chapters here. Maurice Bloch was unable to attend, but provided a chapter. Nadia Abu El-Haj and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro felt their individual papers were too close to their own about-to-be-published books to warrant inclusion, although happily Viveiros de Castro was able to provide commentary on Hugh-Jones's paper; Thomas Hansen and Linda Layne contributed chapters.

We have been fascinated, delighted, moved, amused, and not a little awed by the sheer amount of detail waiting for the interested researcher. Suddenly, virtually everything – newspaper articles, websites, asides in historical texts, and academic publications – seems to point in some way to the importance people around the world attach to names.

INTRODUCTION

Names are words, and as words they are constituent elements in speech acts. Alone, or in combination with other linguistic phenomena, they are sounds that, as a result of the conventions learnt by speakers of a particular community, evoke in the minds of hearers or speakers' mental responses (see the chapter by Lambek (Chapter 6) for a very similar theoretical position).

It is important to begin a discussion of names in this rather pedantic way because, too often, names are considered in the literature in terms of the old and dangerous semiotic model of signifiers signifying signifieds. As has been argued by vom Bruck (this volume), words, including names, pace Lévi-Strauss (1962, chap. 6), are not classifiers and to see them thus is misleading. First, such an approach gives far too fixed an image of meaning, forgetting that the usage of names cannot be separated from pragmatics and that names are therefore used to “do” an almost unlimited number of things. Names, therefore, are tools used in social interaction, which can be put to ever-new uses. Second, the use of names are a constituent part of the social interactions in which they are used, they are never isolated acts, but parts of acts. Third, names, whether used in reference or in address, are one among many ways by which people can be referred to. They do not form a bounded system.

In recent years, miscarriage, stillbirth, and early infant death have increasingly come to pose problems of meaning for middle-class Americans. What is the status of the woman, of her partner, of that which was lost? Why did it happen? What does it mean? How ought one to behave? The dominant strategy in the United States for dealing with this ambiguity is to minimize the loss. Medical explanations stress how common such events are, how insignificant they are in terms of predicting the outcome of a subsequent pregnancy, and indeed how beneficial such losses are – “nature's way of taking care of itself.” Family, friends, and co-workers, people who may have celebrated the pregnancy and joined in the co-construction of the incipient personhood of “the baby,” sometimes respond to the loss by acting as if nothing happened, as if the woman had never even been pregnant. Those who do acknowledge the loss often minimize its importance with comments like, “It was only a miscarriage,” “At least you didn't get to know her,” “You can always have another,” “It was for the best.” Members of pregnancy loss support groups move against this current and often forcefully assert their status as parents and that which was lost as a “baby,” a legitimate source of grief.

In this essay I describe when, to, and by whom names are given, their meaning, and their use by bereaved parents, members of their social networks, and pregnancy loss support group leaders.

In what follows, I attempt to show that among the Orokaiva of Papua New Guinea, the use of a name system constitutes the morphological framework that maps the relations between people and groups through time. This, of course, does not mean that this system is intangible, but on the contrary, that while it is repeatedly reshaped by other dimensions of Orokaiva social life, like historical events, wars, individual endeavors and so forth, its capacity to preserve its general structure render these momentary movements meaningful. The point is thus that the system of names, far from being a rigid framework, is instrumental both in prolonging society through time and in granting meaning to all events.

This Orokaiva fact projects, I believe, a comparative light on an old debate concerning the status of kinship and marriage and that of the title system. The name system is here instrumental in projecting society through time, just as kinship, marriage, and title system may be in other places.

The major contemporary discovery in Melanesia is undoubtedly that persons are not closed up units but that relations constitute them. This conception implies that all sorts of things, like objects of exchange, are integral to the person. In this context, one might expect names to be one of the most intimate assets of the individual. Among the Orokaiva, this is, however, not the case.

Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, naming the victims and the culprits became an urgent matter. Lists of names – of living and dead – were posted daily. For some time there were names that could not be put with certainty in either category. And there were daunting traces of human bodies that could not be attached with certainty to a particular name. “It is terrible to think that a person will go into the ground … [without] a name,” Susan Black, a forensic anthropologist, said in a different context, adding that once the bodies are identified, families can begin mourning. Similarly, Thomas Laqueur has argued that finding and naming the Bosnian victims of genocide in the 1990s seemed the only emotionally possible beginning for a survivor's new life.

Although most of those who perished in the World Trade Center attack were eventually named, many families had, literally, no body to bury. On the other hand, the “true” names of most of the perpetrators remained unknown. Passports attributed to attackers failed to provide adequate clues, many stolen from people far from the scene. In this instance naming was put to the task of establishing moral accountability, while the mistaken attribution of guilt was vehemently rejected by those who felt wronged.

The need to identify the dead by name in New York links, in a very different context, with its polar opposite – the act of de-naming as a form of political annihilation.

Chapter overview

In this chapter we shall argue for advantages of the ritual form hypothesis over the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall take up a wide array of considerations bearing on the two hypotheses' merits. These considerations are of two broad sorts concerning theoretical and empirical matters. We shall address theoretical and conceptual matters first in the next section, since they will help to set the stage for a fair evaluation in the remaining sections of the hypotheses' empirical predictions.

In the first section we shall defend the greater theoretical depth of the ritual form hypothesis. The argument we make in its behalf has two parts. First, we shall take up some persistent conceptual problems with the ritual frequency hypothesis. We shall argue that precisely the kinds of theoretical distinctions that the ritual form hypothesis makes are necessary to remedy these ambiguities. Second, we will show that the ritual form hypothesis isolates a more fundamental cognitive variable than either the ritual frequency hypothesis or Whitehouse's larger theory of religious modes, since ritual form is a conspicuous factor – probably the principal factor – influencing the unexplained, independent variable of the frequency hypothesis, viz., rituals' performance frequencies.

In the remainder of the chapter we turn to the hypotheses' comparative predictive and explanatory strengths with regard to the empirical facts. On pages 139–146 we shall contend that both Whitehouse's general theory and the ritual frequency hypothesis are less well equipped than our theory of ritual competence and the ritual form hypothesis to handle the explanatory problems we mentioned in the previous chapter concerning the uniformity of Whitehouse's doctrinal and imagistic modes.

Whitehouse's ethnography

In October of 1987 Harvey Whitehouse entered the village of Dadul in the Eastern Province of New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea to begin his fieldwork among the Mali Baining. Unbeknownst to him then, his arrival was one of the catalysts for a series of events that made not only for considerable excitement in the area over the next eighteen months but also for an ethnography (Whitehouse, 1995) that is as theoretically fertile as it is dramatic. Inevitably, the short summary which follows will capture little, if any, of the drama, but it will point to some of these materials' theoretically suggestive aspects.

New Britain Island lies off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. The Mali are one of five subgroups of the Baining people, who occupy the rural regions of the Gazelle Peninsula, which constitutes the northern half of the island's Eastern Province. A different ethnic group, the Tolai, occupies the more developed northeastern corner of the Gazelle Peninsula. A third ethnic group, the Pomio, inhabit most of the southern half of the province. Comparatively speaking, the Tolai, unlike the Baining and the Pomio, have prospered from contacts with the industrialized world.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I the area was under German administration. Exclusive of the traumatic Japanese occupation during World War II, from 1919 until independence in 1975, Australia administered the region.