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Paper short abstract:

Marcel Mauss used Arandic ancestral names to trace the development of the concept of person from an agentless "personnage". Exploring the dynamic landscape of Lander Warlpiri naming practices, my paper reexamines the issue of how naming practices relate to the cultural construction of the person.

Paper long abstract:

In his seminal article on the concept of person, Marcel Mauss (1985) used data on the Arandic system of naming to trace the development of the concept from its historical beginnings. He viewed the Aranda “personage” as inhabiting an agentless and inherited role associated with a set of rights and duties that socially subsumed the individual, whose identity was fixed by ancestral name. Since Mauss formulated these ideas, anthropological interest in personal names has increased beyond the use of personal names to denote or classify persons or things in the world. For example, scholars have addressed the multiple functions and evocative nature of names in discourse (for example, Basso, 1988, Silverstein, 1976, 1981, Wagner, 1986, Sansom, 1988). Yet, the question of how personal naming practices relate to the cultural construction of the person in Aboriginal societies has received little attention. My paper explores the dynamic landscape of Lander Warlpiri personal names and naming practices in relation to this issue. Discussing examples of the meanings, use and the giving of names—including gendered “bush” or Dreaming names, nicknames, names acquired at different stages of life, European surnames, Christian names and “no-name”—I trace shifts and continuities in Warlpiri naming processes over time and show how they reveal differing and entangled notions of personhood. Finally, I describe how Lander Warlpiri people’s engagement in a cultural mapping project has revitalized interest in the power of names to relate people to places and potentiate embodied social and property relations.