“Entangled in Histories”: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Names and Naming

TL;DRAbstract

Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, naming the victims and the culprits became an urgent matter. Lists of names – of living and dead – were posted daily. For some time there were names that could not be put with certainty in either category. And there were daunting traces of human bodies that could not be attached with certainty to a particular name. "It is terrible to think that a person will go into the ground … [without] a name," Susan Black, a forensic anthropologist, said in a different context, adding that once the bodies are identified, families can begin mourning. Similarly, Thomas Laqueur has argued that finding and naming the Bosnian victims of genocide in the 1990s seemed the only emotionally possible beginning for a survivor's new life.

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