Discussion about this post

User's avatar
steven lightfoot's avatar

This is good. I agree. There is the expected dig at Trump (it must be in your contract) but you make great points about the arrogance of the present, our role as stewards, and the need to have humility. I am personally a descendant of black slaves and plantation owners from Barbados, I know the subject of slavery in the British Empire very well, and I refuse to judge my ancestors.

Expand full comment
Timothy Burke's avatar

I really think you're missing the point on this particular move.

Look at it this way. There were and still are places all around the world whose names on 20th Century maps were decided by European explorers, conquerors and imperial rulers. It doesn't matter if some of them were nice people, there's still something profoundly odd about insisting that those names are for-all-time names when they are the result of a very recent and ultimately ephemeral moment in human history. Step away for a second and think about it. There's a big waterfall on the Zambezi River on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia that's still referred to as Victoria Falls on most maps. But it was called Mosi-oa-Tunya by the people who lived there between the 16th and 19th Century ("the smoke that thunders"), and slowly, the nations on either side have been trying to restore that name.

I agree completely with you that trying to completely unravel these histories of naming is folly. They are like geological strata of the last five centuries, and have come to be deeply meaningful over time. In many cases, what the last five centuries have made in people and in the world can't be undone via some reversion to an original, and the wrong names designate real things for which there is no other name. Calling the people who Westerners used to call "the Bushmen" by the seemingly more appropriate ethnonym "San" only replaces one obviously patronizing name with one that only the people called the San know is also patronizing. (It's a lightly derisive name given to them by their pastoralist cousins the Khoikhoi that references the foraging lifestyle of San groups.) The San weren't a single people, they were a number of separate bands that didn't see themselves as a group; "San" was as much a way of life as a language or culture. It would be like calling "Swifties" a 'people' and implying that a Swiftie is nothing but a Swiftie and will be a Swiftie forever. And yet, today, the San *are* a people because that is how successive state regimes from the 18th Century to today have related to them; it's what they've become. They might have a better name in the end they'd rather have, but they can't really insist on having no one name; they themselves need one.

But where it's possible to rename places, why not? More importantly, let's actually honor the history of how things get names in the first place! Things get *new names* all the time. Species get renamed when biologists realize that where they thought there was one species, there are three. Towns and places rename when they merge or fade or just want to rebrand. Read up on the bizarre history of how the town of Jim Thorpe renamed itself from being Mauch Chunk and tell me you would have decried the renaming then--or would now insist that this is something that can never ever happen in the future. Names aren't a game of musical chairs where once everybody sits down, that's where they will sit forever.

Why *should* birds have a human name attached to them forever and ever as a popular identifier? Widely seen birds tend to have multiple names, after all--if I see a northern flicker, I can call it a woodpecker, a flicker, Colaptes, Colaptes auratus, yellowhammer, clape, yarrup, gawker bird and many other common names. Some of those names will make no sense outside of the local culture that uses them. Others have faded over time. Birds get new colloquialisms attached to them, as does most of the world that humans see and interact with. Would you stand in the way of that process and say, "No, a Cooper's is a Cooper's forever: only once could there have been a name given to it". It's not even a matter of separating out colloquial names (of which the Cooper's has many), formal ornithological names, and taxonomic names, because the same bodies (more or less) that authenticated "Cooper's hawk" are those deciding to undo that now. Are you saying that the early 19th Century ornithological community is one whose authority you believe should last forever? If so, why do you prefer that community in that moment to the point of making its choices eternal?

I think saying "You know what, no human names on birds or animals period" is actually a very consistent system of nomenclature that isn't making judgments about particular past people or even about imperialism, etc.--it's just saying "Hey, that was kind of weird, right, that we thought animals should be called 'Burke's Badger' rather than just 'Northern Atlantic Badger'" simply because a bloke named Burke got shipwrecked on an island in 1845 and told people there was a new kind of badger there when rescued? Which seems like a fair enough observation: it IS weird. The period you're venerating was a period where people weren't afraid to give old things new names. Why should they be the only ones in human history to do that?

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts