Graduate student Jack C. Shoemaker (Southern Methodist University), under the supervision of Dr. Robert V. Kemper, will undertake research on the social contexts of naming practices. In many societies, names constitute a social commentary, and thus convey important information that otherwise would be invisible to social scientific analysis.
The research will be carried out as a multi-generational study of the personal names that members of the Ma'di population of northern Uganda give their children. The Ma'di are a good site for the development of onomastic (naming) theory because of their particular naming practices. A high percentage of Ma'di children are named by their mothers, who live as perpetual outsiders in the clans of their husbands. A name often reflects the the mother's circumstances at the time the child was born.
Shoemaker will gather and analyze the names of every person from a sample of 30 multi-generational extended families. he will employ systematic qualitative data gathering techniques such as pile sorts. He also will gather data on birth order, important events that occurred around the time they were born, who named the child, what the name meant, and what message the name was intended to communicate. Those who gave names will be asked to explain their choice of name. Since many names refer to death, the researcher will also conduct interviews with each woman to place each of her children in a reproductive history. To ascertain how well names communicate the messages encoded in them, the researcher will ask groups of Ma'di to state what meanings they attribute to a set of names, and will then compare the suggested meanings to any messages the name givers intended to communicate.
This research is important because while names and naming practices are known to be significant in human societies and to vary cross-culturally, they have received little systematic attention. This research will help to fill that significant gap. The research also will contribute new information on the ethnography of the Ma'di people by highlighting issues that women consider significant. This will make possible better social policy addressing women's problems. The research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.
