Names

Abstract

Across cultures, names are viewed as part of the essence of a person’s being and, in their public use, as markers of our belonging to a certain family, ethnic, or national group. But more than that, names have long been understood as having inherent mnemonic and connective power. Aleida Assmann, a scholar of literary and cultural studies, even describes the memory of the dead, and specifically the commemoration of their names, as the anthropological origin of cultural memory (2011: 23ff). The remembrance of the names of the dead is, of course, dependent on cultural context. For example, Romani and Aboriginal Australian cultures forbid the use of the names of the deceased. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, forgetting or suppressing a person’s name means something else entirely. The Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, the symbolic removal of a name from usage, signified removing someone from a community of memory and thus from existence, indicating that the ancients believed that names had immense commemorative power. Jewish memorial practices have a similar foundation. The Hebrew Bible ascribes a crucial significance to names, regarding ‘the survival of a name as the predominant vehicle for carrying the memory of the dead’ (Margalit 2003: 21). In The Ethics of Memory, the philosopher Avishai Margalit creates the image of a ‘double murder’ (2003: 21) to describe what it means to eradicate a name: both the person and their memory are destroyed.