Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity

Chapter 6: The Karen Naming System: Identity and Sociocultural Orientations1

128 Ananda Rajah 128 CHAPTER 6 The Karen Naming System: Identity and Sociocultural Orientations1 Ananda Rajah Introduction The Karen is an ethno-linguistic group found in Thailand and Burma. They have been estimated to number 240,000 in Thailand and perhaps up to 2.4 million in Burma.2 Karen studies, in their most general sense — ethnological, anthropological, historical, and plainly descriptive — have a long history, but to the best of my knowledge, there has been no systematic effort to describe Karen naming systems and explain the cultural logic(s) of their naming systems. This essay is an attempt at filling this gap in Karen studies. This essay examines the naming system of the Palokhi Karen, a small Sgaw Karen community located approximately 90 kilometers northwest of Chiang Mai city in northern Thailand. The cultural significance of their naming system, in which teknonymy is an important feature, cannot be fully understood without consideration of other aspects of Palokhi Karen culture, that is, sex and gender differentiation, kinship terminology, religion, and the subsistence system. The essay sets out some of these complex relations with a focus on sex and gender differentiation, relevant kin terms, and only briefly, with regard to Palokhi Karen religious and subsistence systems. The analysis is sociological in intent: an understanding of the naming and related systems of the Palokhi Karen in terms of socio-cultural orientations and, by implication and extension, societal types. The Karen Naming System 129 A Brief Comparison: Burma and Thailand In mainland Southeast Asia, the Karen in Burma represent perhaps the greatest success story in terms of Protestant Christian conversion and demographic numbers, although Karen acceptance of Buddhism (which has greater historical depth) has probably involved far more Karen people as well as a change in ethnicity from Karen to Mon and Burman. The spread of the idea of the nation-state, on the other hand, resulted in a highly intransigent Karen separatist movement whose leaders are mostly Christian. Historically, Christianity played no small part in the emergence of Karen nationalism.3 Christian conversion has had some consequence for the Karen naming system in Burma (and also in Thailand), but this has been very gradual, considering that Christianity in its Baptist form first took root in Burma in the 1830s. The situation varies depending on where Christian Karen are found in Burma. Field research in Burma has not been possible, but visits to Karen (and Karenni) refugee camps in Thailand suggest that many more Christian Karen have Karen (language)-based names than English (that is, Christian) names.4 Teknonymy is practised, but it is my impression that this is generally confined to Christian Karen from hill-tract villages and small townships. There can be little doubt that Christian Karen in these camps, however they are named, are committed Christians, and their Christianity is not some syncretized version of Christianity and animism. This suggests a degree of tenacity in the Karen naming system. It should be noted, however, that among more “Western”-oriented Karen (by whom I mean those fluent or near fluent in English), Karenlanguage autonyms are not necessarily based on events but on euphony and what parents consider to be exemplary qualities. It does not take a great stretch of the sociological imagination to understand that the conferment of names in this way represents what is wished for as attributes in infants and in their subsequent adult lives. It is also, of course, a considerable departure from the system of event-based names of the kind found in Palokhi, which I shall later examine in detail. Among nationalist Karen, there is an important example that helps to illustrate the complex relationships between the Karen naming system, religious and political change, changes in socio-cultural orientations, and the kinds of analytical challenge they pose. Until he retired or was “eased out” of the KNU and KNLA in 2002, General Saw Bo Mya was President of the separatist Karen National Union and Commander-in-Chief of the Karen National Liberation Army. 130 Ananda Rajah Bo Mya, a Sgaw Karen who speaks Burmese but very little English, came from an animist community in lower Burma, served in the British colonial constabulary, and later in Force 136 under the overall command of Orde Wingate (of “Chindit” fame) during the Second World War. He was a late convert to Seventh-Day Adventist Christianity, by which time he had established...