Personal Names as Narrative in Fiji: Politics of the Lauan Onomasticon

Abstract

In every society, proper names, as well as all words that are being used to make to a specific object rather than a class or category, are a point of contact between language and local, concrete reality of world. Culturally specific of language and constitute, in a broad sense, differences among societies, while concrete, physical, and biological reality represents a starting point of commonality from which some degree of commensurability is attainable. Perhaps this is an underlying basis for idea that the understanding of names and naming [can provide] most valuable key to elucidation of ... social systems (Maybury-Lewis 1984:2). One way that naming of various communities can be compared concerns pattern of interactions each creates among three basic elements of discourse: onomasticon, lexicon, and history. The onomasticon is body of names used as identifying and individuating labels, lexicon is body of words used in general reference, and history is body of narratives that define individual and collective identity. When personal names are considered as words, they link individuals to general, descriptive categories of in group, and when names are considered as narratives they link individuals to politics and social control. Names form linkages among these discourse elements in all societies, but emphases placed on such connections can vary widely. WORDS AND NAMES The relationship between and has provoked considerable discussion among students of language and in western tradition of language philosophy. One appealing functional distinction has it that a word has meaning while a name has reference (Gasque 1991:219). The widespread, perhaps universal, form of verbal art based on possibility of meaningful names - names that exploit play between particular and general and dynamic tension among indexical, iconic, and symbolic senses of - requires such a distinction. But while practitioners of language have enjoyed this ambiguity, philosophers of language have struggled with it. In Augustinian tradition, of every is object that it names. Wittgenstein (1922:47;3.203) says (or shows) that words can be analyzed into primitive elements he calls names, and he asserts that the means object, and the object is its meaning. Meaning and thus being equated, distinction between and on this basis collapses. Wittgenstein's (1958) later work also implies that and cannot be distinguished on basis of meaning, but now reason is that neither one has any. For Wittgenstein, both are game pieces, distinguished by uses to which either may be put under rules of socially constructed language games. The pragmatists, too, led by James and Peirce, tend to question concept of as something that exists on its own, and they view it instead as a social or psychological effect produced by use of a or (James 1907; Peirce 1934:5.411-34). Peirce's discussion of index as a particular type of sign that points something out by virtue of a cause-and-effect relationship with its object provides another way of distinguishing a personal from other kinds of words, but Peirce (1931:2.274-302) insists that there are no pure indices, icons, or symbols; every sign is mixed and combines in some degree characteristics of each type. It follows, perhaps, that there are no pure names and that names and words continually cross and recross in process of usage, whatever boundaries one tries to draw between them. LEXICON, ONOMASTICON, AND HISTORY Usage, context, and convention, then, are central to problem of relationship between and name. For this reason, question cannot be fully framed and answered in discourse of language philosophy, which is located in imaginary, universal object domain - a domain outside of history and social context of usage - that might be called language in general. …

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