Personal Names in Asia: History, Culture and Identity

Preface

PREFACE James C. Scott The social use of personal names is as close to a cultural universe as one can find — even if, in some cases, that name is avoided as in a teknonym (for example, when someone is, say, identified as “x’s mother’s brother.” In fact, it is hard to imagine social life at all without naming systems for designating or addressing a particular, unique individual. Precisely because of the universality of the practice, the form it takes in different cultures and times offers a valuable window for social analysis. And such an analysis is exactly what this exceptional collection of essays provides in abundance. Rather than summarize these essays, I intend to highlight in this preface a few of the larger issues that a study of names can illuminate. For people who inhabit a culture and its naming practices, it is easy, perhaps unavoidable, to naturalize those practices, to assume that they have existed from time immemorial and that they are the most obvious techniques for navigating the social world. They thus take on a spurious historical depth and a spurious social autonomy. However, in fact, many naming practices are luxuriantly variable from place to place and have shifted dramatically from time to time. Neither they nor their close cousin, “kinship systems,” are unmoved movers. They are best seen not as “givens” but as social constructions very much affected by power relations, cultural contact, and formal institutions. Perhaps the most fundamental distinction between different naming practices is that between vernacular naming practices, on the one hand, and official (i.e., state-inflected) naming practices on the other. Long ago there were only vernacular naming practices. In the modern world they jostle for recognition with official, state-created forms of naming. The cultural superabundance of vernacular naming practices is illustrated by their plurality and their instability. It is common for non-state (or prestate ) peoples to have many personal names for different situations and interlocutors (e.g., with parents, various siblings, age-mates, inferiors, vii superiors, teachers, spirits, strangers). A child named in utero may be renamed during a difficult labor to change its (and its mother’s) luck, named again after an illness or noteworthy event, or to take the name of a recently deceased person to appease his or her spirit. Such systems work perfectly well at the vernacular level. No one is in doubt about who is who. Vernacular naming systems do not, however, have the necessary discriminating power for the most important state activities: taxation, land registration, conscription, corvée, and police work. Vernacular practices are, in a word, illegible. How can officials find a particular individual in a world, until recently, without photo-identification, national registration systems, birth certificates, serial numbers, fingerprints, and now, iris scans and DNA profiles? In rural, early modern England, for example, it would have been common for 90 per cent of the men in a village to carry one of only eight names (typically kings’ names like William, Henry, Edward, Charles, James, or John). How to find a particular William? At the time such a man would usually have a second name — a by-name, not a permanent patronym. Thus a William who lived on the hill might be locally known as William Hill, and a lazy William as William Doolittle, and a William who was the son of John as William Johnson. Such names, however, changed with each generation. They were local nicknames, unknown outside the small face-to-face community. Only later did they become fixed, legal, inherited patronyms. Gradually, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, the populations of Western Europe acquired permanent patronyms that tracked male (the taxpaying population!) genealogy, structured the official life of the nuclear family, and made the administration of taxes, conscription, land tenure, and criminal law that much easier. The proliferation of the permanent patronym closely mimics the geography of increasing contact and interaction with officials and their institutions. Prussia’s Jews only got permanent patronyms in the mid-nineteenth century, following the Revolution of 1848, as a condition of full citizenship. For many people, however, vernacular names were the currency of daily life and official names might have only a “paper” existence in the tax records and deeds. The point of this brief sketch is to emphasize that permanent patronyms were, everywhere, a state (and church) project, pursued with the goal...