ABSTRACT
The naming of places is a key component in the relationship between place and the politics of identity in contemporary societies. In this sense, naming is a form of norming.1 Names are part of both a symbolic and material order that provides normality and legitimacy to those who dominate the politics of (place) representation. Saul Cohen and Nurit Kliot (1992), for example, have illustrated the way that the Israeli nation-state selects place names for the administered territories of the Golan, Gaza and West Bank in order to reinforce national Zionist ideologies. Between 1977 and 1992 Biblical and Talmudic place names were introduced by the ruling right-wing Likud bloc to project Israel as the rightful heir to the holy land (Cohen and Kliot 1992, 664-6). Such naming produces a form of “linguistic settlement” that produces places through the simple enunciation of intentions to do so. As Paul Carter (1987, 137) observes of the Australian colonial context, “the would-be settler was more than ever obliged to settle the country rhetorically, rather than etymologically: he had, more than ever, to conjure up the object of his desire and, through the act of articulating it, to bring it into being.” Wilbur Zelinsky (1983, 1) has directly linked “the intensity and exuberance of nationalism in the young United States’ with “the great number and frequency of nationalistic place names to be seen [there].” Zelinsky documented 3,771 counties and minor civil divisions in the United States named after national heroes and notables (1983, 14-15). At the same time, he found only 43 such cases in Canada (Zelinsky 1983, 15). In the South Pacic region, Ron Crocombe (1991) suggests naming places was one form of extending ownership claims. About 600 years ago in Rarotonga, for example, the conqueror Tangiia dominated the indigenous inhabitants by force of arms, but he asserted his hegemony by renaming their lands and places. Crocombe also notes the gendered character of naming places, observing that such activities were “an attribute of masculinity, of power, of control,
which were male prerogatives in all cultures at the time the names were given” (Crocombe 1991, 1).2 The masculinity of naming is certainly reected in the many New Zealand3 places that were named for British male military gures such as Hamilton, Edgecumbe, Marlborough, Napier, Nelson, Palmerston, Picton and Wellington (Carter 1987; Pawson 1992).
