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 referred to 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 Warfare.
Fortunately, these efforts don’t at all times work. When the president proposed renaming Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World Warfare I,” veterans’ groups objected. Somewhat than deal with 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 will 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 title. We title 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 so much concerning the ideas, attitudes and values that outline it.
As an example, amongst Jola villagers on the West African coast, the place I’ve carried out ethnographic analysis, one in every of my closest associates is called Sipalunto — a stunning title fabricated from syllabic hints that, when deciphered, imply “a hippopotamus crossed there.” This might be unintelligible except you already know the backstory: Sipalunto’s mom overheard some spiteful gossip in a rice paddy that hippopotamuses had just lately 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 title.
Virtually each Jola title carries inside it a narrative a couple of social fake pas. These scraps of oral historical past add as much as an archive of previous offenses towards Jola notions of correct habits, 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 title provides a type of gracious politics of nonconfrontational remediation, one thing akin to what the theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich referred to as “instruments for conviviality.”
One other riff on this strategy may be present in Western Apache placenames, as mentioned in anthropologist Keith Basso’s masterful “Wisdom Sits in Places.” A meadow referred to as “crescent moon camp,” a mountain referred to as “white rocks lie above in a compact cluster.” These names describe bodily options but in addition allude to one thing that occurred there. “All these locations have tales,” Basso was instructed. And these tales are “spatially anchored” morality tales. Their plot would possibly contain what occurred when somebody killed a cow, however every is finally about “the system of guidelines and values in accordance with which Apaches anticipate one another to arrange and regulate their lives.” Apache place names additionally do delicate social and political work. Somewhat than publicly embarrassing anybody for improper habits, the rigorously named panorama prompts individuals to mirror on their misconduct and attempt to mend it.
As a result of names may be so highly effective, efforts to alter them are additionally revealing. All U.S. presidential administrations have finished their share of naming and renaming. Past government decrees there are numerous situations throughout a number of political camps to reevaluate — and infrequently take away — the names of buildings, monuments, establishments, streets, cities and even one another. Within the city the place I stay virtually half of the general public faculties have been renamed since I moved there a decade in the past. We must always proceed to contemplate whom we honor as a namesake based mostly on newly revealed info, modified understandings and reworked sensibilities. And it issues how we achieve this.
There’s a distinction between the examples I’ve provided 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 faculties — 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 consult 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 government order titled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” However even past the despotic ways which might be this president’s trademark model, his strategy fulfills the worst potential of the facility to call.
There are, after all, 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, finally 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. Not like 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 as a way to nurture shared communal objectives.
Bluntly mandating unsubtle title modifications exhibits the other strategy. It’s anti-creative. It makes use of names to comprise, constrain and dictate. Somewhat than obliquely encouraging prosocial habits, this mode of renaming denudes historical past and humanity.
Amongst myriad different issues to be vigilant about as of late, 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 elementary 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 top.
Joanna Davidson is an affiliate professor of anthropology at Boston College.
