Names and Naming

From an anthropological, comparative point of view it can be securely stated that the analytic category ‘personal name’ describes a centrally important aspect of all of the different styles of human existence that anthropologists and historians have recorded over the years. Whilst specific processes of personal naming vary widely from context to context and across time, the near omnipresence of modes of naming personal singularity cannot be doubted. Human ways of life are both social and personal, and naming is one of the central aspects through which the two imply each other.