Naming the World: Language and Power Among the Northern Arapaho by Andrew Cowell (review)

scholars across disciplines acknowledge that understanding a language is vital to understanding the culture with which it is interwoven. In Naming the World, Andrew Cowell offers readers a glimpse into the ways culture shapes language and language shapes culture on the Arapaho Wind River Reservation. Cowell (coauthor of The Arapaho Language, a comprehensive grammar and textbook for advanced students of the Arapaho language, a collaboration with Alonso Moss Sr.) expands his study of the Arapaho language, using an ethnographic, particularist approach that focuses on Arapaho naming practices and their links to social and sacred power. Cowell’s text explores the ways place naming, personal naming, and naming of new objects and concepts are handled by the Arapaho people, with the authority to select names usually reserved for recognized elders who are fluent in the Arapaho language. Cowell rightly dismisses the idea of a singular “Arapaho Culture” and bases his arguments about language usage and naming practices in an anthropological analysis of diverse groups within the Wind River Reservation, which he labels as “communities of practice” (COPs). Cowell concludes that names are a symbolic resource for the Arapaho; that there is a “fundamental discontinuity . . . between the language practices of the community and its language ideologies” (3) both in the present and over time; that those discontinuities can only be understood through an analysis of the various COPs within the larger community.

In chapter 1 Cowell lays the groundwork for his argument by describing various COPs within the Arapaho reservation and exploring their differing perspectives on ceremony, kinship, the gender- and age-based transmission of knowledge, and the Arapaho language itself. The COP most invested in maintaining traditional Arapaho culture and the daily use of the Arapaho language is labeled by Cowell as AC (Arapaho Culture). Within the AC, according to Cowell, elders hold most of the authority and control most of the resources, including cultural knowledge, which is not always the case in other COPs. Other COPs identified within the Wind River Reservation are Politico- Tribalism, Evangelical Christianity, Assimilationism, and Pan- Indianism. People who identify with these groups relate differently to the Arapaho language and to Arapaho naming practices, although most Arapaho people continue to believe that an Arapaho name given by an authority figure is sacred and offers the named personal, social, or mythical power.

In chapter 2 Cowell discusses various metaphors that occur in Arapaho speech and the relationship of those metaphors to historical events, cultural norms within the community, and mythical elements. Chapter 3 takes a diachronic approach to discussing landscape names and their relationship to power, while chapter 4 is devoted to personal naming—who has the authority or power to give a name, how names and their relationship to power are viewed by members of different COPs, and how Hollywood-style Indian names have impacted the kinds of names desired by the members of some COPs. Chapter 5 focuses on folk etymology, offering examples of names that have sprung up from various sources not usually endowed with the authority to name. Chapter 6 explores traditional Arapaho customs and practices for naming new things or ideas that were not part of traditional Arapaho culture, such as animals or landscapes that were introduced to the Arapaho when they moved onto the Great Plains or devices created or adopted in an ever- shifting culture. This chapter may be the most dense and difficult in the text for nonlinguists, but most of Cowell’s book, although it is an anthropological linguistic analysis, is generally accessible to a wider audience.

While Cowell does cite scholarly sources, the critical analysis of naming and its relationship to power is based in Cowell’s work with the Northern Arapaho on the Wind River Reservation. Cowell writes about his work both with elders who are fluent in Arapaho and with those who are learning Arapaho, shares Arapaho conversations recorded on the reservation and parses them for study, explores the role of humor in teaching students learning...