Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 “Entangled in Histories”: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming
- 2 “Your Child Deserves a Name”: Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Memory in Pregnancy Loss
- 3 Why the Dead Do Not Bear Names: The Orokaiva Name System
- 4 The Substance of Northwest Amazonian Names
- 5 Teknonymy and the Evocation of the “Social” Among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar
- 6 What's in a Name? Name Bestowal and the Identity of Spirits in Mayotte and Northwest Madagascar
- 7 Calling into Being: Naming and Speaking Names on Alaska's North Slope
- 8 On Being Named and Not Named: Authority, Persons, and Their Names in Mongolia
- 9 Injurious Names: Naming, Disavowal, and Recuperation in Contexts of Slavery and Emancipation
- 10 Where Names Fall Short: Names as Performances in Contemporary Urban South Africa
- 11 Names as Bodily Signs
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Substance of Northwest Amazonian Names
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 “Entangled in Histories”: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming
- 2 “Your Child Deserves a Name”: Possessive Individualism and the Politics of Memory in Pregnancy Loss
- 3 Why the Dead Do Not Bear Names: The Orokaiva Name System
- 4 The Substance of Northwest Amazonian Names
- 5 Teknonymy and the Evocation of the “Social” Among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar
- 6 What's in a Name? Name Bestowal and the Identity of Spirits in Mayotte and Northwest Madagascar
- 7 Calling into Being: Naming and Speaking Names on Alaska's North Slope
- 8 On Being Named and Not Named: Authority, Persons, and Their Names in Mongolia
- 9 Injurious Names: Naming, Disavowal, and Recuperation in Contexts of Slavery and Emancipation
- 10 Where Names Fall Short: Names as Performances in Contemporary Urban South Africa
- 11 Names as Bodily Signs
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The high profile of names and naming systems (“onomastics”) is a distinctive hallmark of the ethnographic literature on lowland South America. Names were typically excluded from anthropological research on kinship – witness textbooks on the subject – but when it came to the complex social structures of the Gê and Bororo or the Kariera-like section systems of the Panoans, relations predicated on the transfer of names turned out to be of crucial significance. Following pioneering work on these groups, most monographs on lowland Amerindians now include a section on onomastics and some are entirely devoted to the topic.
In an influential comparative survey, Viveiros de Castro has suggested that Amerindian naming systems can be ranged along a continuum from the “exonymic” to the “endonymic.” In the exonymic systems of the Ikpeng and Yanomamö or the Araweté and other Tupi-speaking groups, names come from without and from others: the gods, the dead, enemies, or animals. In the endonymic systems of the Gê-speaking Kayapó and Timbira, names are conserved as heirlooms within the group, make up part of its corporate property and identity, and designate particular social relations. Furthermore, for the exonymic Tupinambá, the emphasis was on the individual, heroic acquisition of singular and never-to-be-repeated names, which set the bearer apart while, for the endonymic Kayapó, the emphasis is on collectively sanctioned and ceremonialized inter-vivos transmission that keeps a limited stock of names in perpetual circulation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Anthropology of Names and Naming , pp. 73 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
- 2
- Cited by