ABSTRACT
Ever since the late 1980s researchers in social sciences and humanities have focussed their efforts on the entanglements of language with power relations. The intellectual and political legitimacy of this “cultural turn” has, however, been called into question for a tendency to focus on theory at the expense of empirical evidence, a reliance on relativism and a “descent into discourse” (Palmer 1990; cited in Jackson 2000) that fails to recognise the importance of material cultural processes. This book attempts to signpost one potential way out of this impasse. Exploring the power of naming in the construction of historical and contemporary landscapes, Critical Toponymies aims to show that to take language seriously can bring the material and the discursive together in a productive relationship that avoids binary distinctions between theory and empirics or the material and discursive. In this way, the volume makes a contribution to what at the turn of the century was termed the necessity for “rematerializing cultural geographies” (Philo 2000; Jackson 2000). The chapters in this volume also represent a showcase of recently revitalized “critical” toponymic research, work that extends a eld that has traditionally been characterized by political innocence to say the least. This newer critical work on place naming draws on recent social and cultural theories that help to understand the always-already power laden character of naming places (Kearns and Berg, this volume). Whilst there have been many monographs published that discuss toponymy generally, this volume is the rst interdisciplinary collection published in English that tackles explicitly place naming as “a political practice par excellence of power over space” (Pinchevski and Torgovnik 2002).
