To live is to be marked. Naming practices among a Valley Nambikwara people

Resumo

Abstract: Naming of individual persons appears to be universal human practice. However, the practice of naming, its sociocultural meaning and the conception of personhood involved varies considerably among societies. Naming, for example, can be fixed, ostentatious, very public and a strong mode of social identification, as in Brazil. In the case of the Valley Nambikwara, as described by Fiorini for the Wasusu (in his unpublished PhD dissertation), names are reluctantly given, held with a degree of secrecy to outsiders, and are not to be pronounced in the presence of the bearer. Lévi-Strauss already described this in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1984), when the Nambikwara came to fame even outside ethnological circles. In order to interpret this practice, the linguistic notion of markedness may reveal some of the characteristics of the meaning of the reluctance and secrecy involved. Applying the linguistic notion of markedness to the naming practice suggests a conception of naming as an individualising act that derives from the contingencies of exceptional lived incidents in the daily lived world. Contingencies that stand out from normal daily life, these are the incidents that mark the person in question (many times in the body itself). Incidents that, in a way, are accidents, and that may happen again, so peoples may be renamed in the course of their life. Such incidents may be caused by some form of negligent actions by close kin, that is, an action not affecting oneself but some other person of their close kin. In fact, it seems that close kin are conceived as being very much substantially the “same”, and it is as if the marking of a person by a name is an undesired operation. Marking a person apparently emphasises an unwanted expression of separateness of the Person by the differentiation from the “sameness” of the set of close kin. Names of persons and local groups seem to particularise with a negative kind of predicate: as if the ideal Nambikwara Person (proposed by D. Price), as well as his kin and local group, should be ‘unmarked’ in order to maintain the completeness of the ideal Nambikwara Person and hence, in fact, maintain the completeness of the ideal Human Person. Neither the unborn nor the dead are named, not yet becoming a distinct Person, or leaving behind being a distinct Person. Only the fully capable adult is fully a complete, and unmarked, Human Person. However, to live is to be subject to the contingencies of the lived world, and these produce the incidents that impact on the lives of everyone and that mark the Person, becoming expressed in a name. Reluctantly so, although names clearly relate to marking incidents, people insist that the names ‘really mean nothing’. ‘Unmarkedness’ appears to be ideal (superior, general, and collective), markedness to be avoided (inferior, personalised, creating separateness).