Amid the every day cacophony of crises and cruelty, the renaming continues. Maybe you’ve seen? As quickly as he stepped again into the Oval Workplace, the president renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Denali. And the administration insists that the Persian Gulf be known as the Arabian Gulf. On his first day as secretary of Protection, Pete Hegseth renamed North Carolina’s Fort Liberty again to Fort Bragg. Now Hegseth himself has a brand new title: secretary of Conflict.
Fortunately, these efforts don’t at all times work. When the president proposed renaming Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World Conflict I,” veterans’ teams objected. Fairly than concentrate on army victory or a single conquest, they reminded him (and all of us) that Veterans Day is supposed to honor all who’ve served and sacrificed. The president’s feint at renaming Veterans Day proved so unpopular that it fizzled away. However different renamings ensued.
It could be comical, this scrubbing and dubbing of names inside and past the president’s dominion, if it weren’t so grotesque.
As an anthropologist, I’ve studied and taught about many sorts of naming practices. All human societies identify. We identify individuals, locations and issues. Naming practices have lengthy intrigued anthropologists due to their simultaneous universality and their breathtaking variety. How a society names can inform us quite a bit concerning the ideas, attitudes and values that outline it.
For example, amongst Jola villagers on the West African coast, the place I’ve carried out ethnographic analysis, one among my closest pals is known as Sipalunto — a beautiful identify manufactured from syllabic hints that, when deciphered, imply “a hippopotamus crossed there.” This might be unintelligible until the backstory: Sipalunto’s mom overheard some spiteful gossip in a rice paddy that hippopotamuses had not too long ago ravaged and most of the people have been avoiding. The gossipers thought they have been safely out of earshot, however their breach was captured and preserved in Sipalunto’s identify.
Virtually each Jola identify carries inside it a narrative a few social fake pas. These scraps of oral historical past add as much as an archive of previous offenses towards Jola notions of correct conduct, all encoded in private names. Such lyrical and suggestive names do political work as their every day repetition recollects an indiscretion and reminds listeners of shared social and ethical codes. A rebuke gently wrapped in a baby’s identify gives a type of gracious politics of nonconfrontational remediation, one thing akin to what the theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich known as “instruments for conviviality.”
One other riff on this strategy might be present in Western Apache placenames, as mentioned in anthropologist Keith Basso’s masterful “Knowledge Sits in Locations.” A meadow known as “crescent moon camp,” a mountain known as “white rocks lie above in a compact cluster.” These names describe bodily options but additionally allude to one thing that occurred there. “All these locations have tales,” Basso was advised. And these tales are “spatially anchored” morality tales. Their plot may contain what occurred when somebody killed a cow, however every is in the end about “the system of guidelines and values based on which Apaches anticipate one another to arrange and regulate their lives.” Apache place names additionally do refined social and political work. Fairly than publicly embarrassing anybody for improper conduct, the rigorously named panorama prompts individuals to mirror on their misconduct and attempt to mend it.
As a result of names might be so highly effective, efforts to vary them are additionally revealing. All U.S. presidential administrations have completed their share of naming and renaming. Past govt decrees there are numerous situations throughout a number of political camps to reevaluate — and sometimes take away — the names of buildings, monuments, establishments, streets, cities and even one another. Within the city the place I reside virtually half of the general public colleges have been renamed since I moved there a decade in the past. We must always proceed to contemplate whom we honor as a namesake primarily based on newly revealed info, modified understandings and reworked sensibilities. And it issues how we accomplish that.
There’s a distinction between the examples I’ve supplied and the efforts of the present administration to rename mountains, seas and holidays. Within the final century, most efforts to rename — whether or not landmarks, military bases or colleges — have been deliberative and comparatively participatory processes. They usually concerned public debates, collective decision-making and ample consideration. The Alaska Legislature requested the federal authorities in 1975 to confer with the very best mountain in North America as Denali, as Native Alaskans name it; in 2015, the Obama administration obliged.
Against this, the present president acted swiftly and unilaterally, vowing in December 2024 to revert to calling the mountain McKinley and doing so when he was sworn in a month later with an govt order titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” However even past the despotic techniques which can be this president’s trademark fashion, his strategy fulfills the worst potential of the ability to call.
There are, in fact, numerous different examples — each historic and imaginary — of names getting used as devices of management. Nazis renamed Jews whose private names weren’t clearly Jewish, in the end changing even these with tattooed numbers. In Margaret Atwood’s fictional dystopian future,“The Handmaid’s Story,” handmaids are stripped of their names and renamed as possessions of their commanders: Offred, Ofwarren, Ofglen.
However it may be in any other case. In contrast to brutal assertions of dominance, the coded meanings in Jola private names and the allusive tales in Apache placenames are mild invites: to be taught the backstory, inform the story, mirror on the ethical. Naming, at its greatest, at its most human and humane, is a fragile and evocative affair. It elicits curiosity, reflection and interpretation with the intention to nurture shared communal targets.
Bluntly mandating unsubtle identify adjustments reveals the other strategy. It’s anti-creative. It makes use of names to comprise, constrain and dictate. Fairly than obliquely encouraging prosocial conduct, this mode of renaming denudes historical past and humanity.
Amongst myriad different issues to be vigilant about nowadays, we have to take note of names. Like so a lot of its different actions, this administration’s strategy to naming distorts and deforms a basic human act. It represents the basest model of our uniquely human energy to call. That’s not an Edenic starting; it’s the start of the tip.
Joanna Davidson is an affiliate professor of anthropology at Boston College.
