Background
Why do humans name? Humans assign names to nearly everything: people, professions, places, items, ideas. It is a fundamental act to name and we often take names and labels for granted. Theorists such as Jacques Derrida have spent countless hours delving into the politics, ethics, and nuances of language contained in the act of naming. Derrida explores this a linguistic, literary, and deeply philosophical realm in his collection of essays On The Name (Derrida 1995). Likewise, histories of surnames, individual names, and geographic names have been conducted for many cultures, such as Omi Morgenstern Leissner’s treatment of Jewish naming rites (Leissner 2001), Mark Peters “Notes on the Place Names of Ngamiland” (Peters 1972), and Peter Hawkin’s article “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt” (Peters 1993). These examples are only a small sampling of the academic papers regarding the act of naming in various situated contexts, yet they touch on several of the fundamental questions that the act of naming inspires. Leissner demonstrates the close relationship “between bearing a name and belonging to a community” (Leissner 2001, 140) and indicates that being named both individualizes a person and incorporates them into society. Through his exploration of names within monuments of death, such as war memorials and the AIDS quilt, Hawkins demonstrates the importance of names in the creation of public memory. While both of these use the example of individual names to illustrate the values, symbolism, remembrance, and community, Peters explores names in the formation of place in the context of European Colonization of Botswana. He discusses the history of colonization, focusing on the changing language and names that label the places in Ngamiland. Peters argues that “the act of naming is a historical act” and that in Ngamiland, this history in particularly visible in the names because “the linguistic character of a name indicates who the name givers were” (Peters 219). Here, names and language symbolize power shifts and historical moments, making geographical names an important historical text. The field of theories on naming is broad, just as the act of naming is broad. From these three specific examples however, we can see that names are invested with social values, historical moments, and public memory. Each of these papers attempts to answer the question “how are values embedded in the act of naming?” for their specific contexts. I too take this question as the frame to my research.
The other framing question that guides my research and inquiry is “what does it mean to be wild?” The definition of wild and its relationship to the concept of wilderness has been a subject of great debate, as outlined in Callicott and Nelson’s two anthologies of wilderness philosophy (Nelson and Callicott 1998, Nelson and Callicott 2008). These cross-disciplinary collections of wilderness thought from authors, ecologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, well-known environmental figures of eras past explore a vast number of perspectives on wilderness. Although some might think that the topic of wilderness is rather beaten to death, I argue that the place of wilderness in the modern world is still up for critical debates. Especially as we broach the epoch of the Anthropocene, the concept of wilderness as described in the Wilderness Act of 1964 as “untrammeled by man” may becoming extinct. These anthropogenic global changes might change the definition of wild, or they might destroy the remaining evidence of true wildness. Nevertheless, the United State continues to designate new wilderness areas under the same definition from 1964. In order to evaluate what wild is today in relation to wilderness, I am to track the potential changes to wilderness values and ethics at least from the passing of the wilderness act until today.
Situated Context
Because of the demonstrated ability of the act of naming to reveal values, I propose a research project which applies theories, histories, and etymologies of naming to the federal lands in the United States that are designated as wilderness. Each of these approximately 700 areas are named, and many of them are named after people. I find it immensely curious that the land which we ascribe and mandate the least amount of human contact is labeled by famous people. On one hand, to designate a parcel of land as wilderness is to protect it to the highest level possible under the laws of the United States. On the other, to bar access and activity from occurring is a type of control and human construction in itself. This paradox of wilderness has not been thoroughly treated by the wilderness debates. To this end, wilderness areas are an apt place to seek the elusive meaning of the wild.
Research Question
What does the act of naming wilderness areas in the United States reveal about what it means to be wild?
Methods
- Statistical analysis of the names of wilderness areas
- Using a list of wilderness areas I will code each item with categories such as “artist,” “politician,” “Native American tribe,” “geographic feature,” “historic event,” etc. I will calculate the percentage of each category in relation to the total number of wilderness areas considering each item equally as well as considering each item according to its land area. Additionally, I will investigate if trends in naming according to each category have changed over time since the beginning of wilderness/national monument system. I will conduct separate analyses for the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to determine the percentage of names in each category in each decade by the same standards listed above.
- Qualitative Analysis of names
- While I cannot conduct a full qualitative analysis of the history and etymology over 700 wilderness areas, I will choose about 15-20 wilderness areas to research extensively. I will investigate the process and reasoning behind naming these specific wilderness areas, identify the stakeholders, see if there were alternative names, and use these as case to discover the process of naming federal lands.
- I will research the history of each of these sample names (Native American title, historical figure, etc.) to find out information about their specific relationship with environmental values, defining the wild, philosophies on wilderness.
References
Callicott, J. Baird, and Michael P. Nelson. 1998. The Great New Wilderness Debate. University of Georgia Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. On the Name. Stanford University Press.
Hawkins, Peter S. 1993. “Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt.” Critical Inquiry 19 (4): 752–79.
Leissner, Omi Morgenstern. 2001. “Jewish Women’s Naming Rites and the Rights of Jewish Women.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, no. 4: 140–77.
Nelson, Michael P., and J. Baird Callicott. 2008. The Wilderness Debate Rages on: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate. University of Georgia Press.
Peters, Mark A. 1972. “Notes on the Place Names of Ngamiland.” Botswana Notes and Records 4: 219–33.
US Congress. 1964. The Wilderness Act of 1964, 88th Congress, 4th sess.