Jeux de noms. Les noms de personne à Minot

Abstract

Une analyse historique et sociologique des noms de personne (patronymes, prénoms, sobriquets) dans un village de la Bourgogne du Nord, et leur mise en relation avec les noms de lieu, fait apparaître qu'appellations toponymiques et appellations individuelles relèvent d'un même système et qu'il y a similarité entre catégories spatiales et catégories nominales. La même pensée organisatrice semble avoir ordonné l'un et l'autre domaine. Toponymie et patronymie constituent deux langages en miroir. Une continuité existe entre espace nommé et société dénommée. Au delà, c'est tout le problème des rapports entre système anthroponymique et identité qui se trouve posé ici.

The time of the interval: Historicity, modernity, and epoch in rural France

“…They are effectively a popular comic art form (Hassoun 2000; cf. Segalen 1980; Zonabend 1979), and their “grotesque” character, often focused on bodily caricature, is traceable to living traditions of popular humor and folk culture dating from at least the Middle Ages (Bakhtin 1984:303). Sobriquets are also a key component of local identity practices, and in Monadières (as elsewhere) nearly every Monadièrois and Monadièroise had been granted one at some stage.…”

Anonymous introductions: identity and belonging in Corsica

“…We thus rejoin classic anthropological analyses of interpersonal knowledge, or ‘ interconnaissance ’, as the core of village sociality in France (Zonabend 1990) and in Corsica (Galibert 2004 b : 34, 150; Meisterheim 1999: 9; Ravis‐Giordani 1983), which describe the daily (re)construction of a common knowledge which is ‘the semantic fabric without which no society can exist’ (Galibert 2004 b : 205). ‘Village studies’ have often been stigmatized for reifying the local or local culture (Boissevain 1975; Cole 1977; Grillo 1980; and, more recently, Gupta & Ferguson 1997).…”

“…In Cécile's example, the negative reaction to a stranger demanding to know your name seems to suggest this kind of economy of secrecy (also described for other French rural locations, e.g. Zonabend 1990). And yet it is notable that the lady's proud response that she ‘ used to be a Mattei’ was as revealing of family histories and her ‘private life’, if not more, than a simple answer concerning her patronym would have been.…”

“…To say this is to take seriously the resilience of the links between places, pasts, and persons, but this in turn restates in sharpened form a problem inherent in earlier anthropological discussions of ‘interknowledge’. Indeed, in such analyses, ‘interknowledge’ effectively marks an interiority , ‘the closed universe of the village community, in which links of interconnaissance powerfully insert the individual into the group’ (Zonabend 1990: 260). This common knowledge produces the organic interpenetration of place, people, and history, ‘the communitarian mental landscape in which the community re‐identifies itself’ (Galibert 2004 b : 205, original emphasis).…”

“…... so is this indeed a ‘Mediterranean’ story? But there is more: Marcel Proust describes the importance of knowing in very similar terms in the fictional (and yet recognizably ‘French’) town of Combray; very similar plays on names to those in Crucetta have been described in the Bourguignon village of ‘Minot’ described by Zonabend and others (Zonabend 1990); some of the naming practices discussed here are inflected by Catholicism; in ways which I have not had time to explore, Edwards and Strathern's account of English kinship is so apposite as to suggest that much of what I have been describing here could be glossed as ‘Euro‐American’ (Edwards & Strathern 2000); some might even be tempted to go further, and try to find in the similarity between this case and Stasch's account of West Papua something even more fundamental about human relationality (Stasch 2002). All of these framings, and many, many more, are plausible.…”