Lunchtime Seminar – 27 October – Mark Turin

N.B. This seminar is in-person only, and, at an earlier than usual time of 12.00-13.00

Naming, Re-naming, Un-naming in Settler Colonial Contexts

Mark Turin (The University of British Columbia, Canada)

In today’s lunchtime seminar, I offer a critical reflection on place names, personal names and the enduring aftershocks of colonial naming practices. Building on case studies from North America and the Himalayan region, I reflect on how naming practices intersect with political moments to create moments of social transformation and cultural possibility.

The province that lends my home institution in Canada its name—British Columbia—exemplifies the nomenclatural perversity of colonialism. Not only is ‘British Columbia’ a logical impossibility—it really can’t be both—it also reflects the paucity of the imperial imagination that time and again rehearses the same dead kings, recent queens and Old-World home towns that migrants carried with them as they settled.

Recent, high-profile re-namings in Vancouver, sweeping aside historical nods to founding racists fathers in order to better reflect the local linguistic landscape—such as Trutch Street becoming Musqueamview Street and Sir William Macdonald Elementary now Xpey’ Elementary (xpey’ meaning cedar in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language of the Musqueam people)—underscore the political importance of thinking through (and talking about) how names are given and bestowed, by whom and in what language. We are all inevitably represented through and by our place names, and toponymic deficiencies reveal much if we pay attention.

In the same way that place names reflect a society’s values, personal names encode a society’s vision for itself—for what is normative, acceptable and even aspirational. From European Jews who were given (or took) names like Goldberg or Rosen only to be renamed again on arriving in Ellis Island; to Tibetans who have been renamed and reclassified not once, but twice, first by the Chinese state and then by English-speaking regimes that demand a first name and last name on travel documents, marginalized and minoritized communities have found ways to resist hegemonic naming practices for as long as they have been subjected to their dominance.

Names are an ideal area for cross-disciplinary research. Thanks to more recent work by vom Bruck, Bodenhorn and others, this historically understudied area of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is gaining more critical attention. Representative and inclusive naming is a matter of linguistic justice that impacts us all.

Bio:

Mark Turin (PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006) is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter, and an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is cross-appointed between the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of Anthropology. Mark founded both the World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project  in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. For over twenty years, Mark’s regional focus has been the Himalayan region (particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan), and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Mark writes and teaches on language reclamation, revitalization, documentation and conservation; language mapping, policies, politics and language rights; orality, archives, digital tools and technology. He is the author (or co-author) of five books, the (co)editor of 12 volumes, and he edits an open access series on oral literature. Mark has been a regular BBC presenter on issues of linguistic diversity and language endangerment.