What's in a name?

[Joe Quick]

I was wondering what everyone's perspective is on the names that we use for groups of people.  Should we try to use the most common ethnonym (i.e. the name used most in the literature) or the group's autonym (the name that they use for themselves). 

For instance, do we say Ojibwe, Chippewa, or Anishinabe?  Most people will recognize Ojibwe or Chippewa but Anishinabe might be more appropriate.

For the article that I'm working on, should I use Quiché (the standard Spanish spelling) or K'iche' (the standardized Maya spelling)?

This might not be terribly important, but now is the best time to develop a convention.  Of course whatever we do, we should remember to establish redirects for other spellings and names.

[Derek Harkness]

You can use all normal names. Pick one to be the primary name then set up redirects on the other names to point to the primary one. In the beginning section of the article you should mention the different names.

If there is an English name, then that's probably the best primary since this is an English language site, but where all the names foreign, which one is best for the primary is very hard to choose. Ultimatly, if you have the redirects setup, the primary name is not so important.

[Jamie_Szudy]

I would suggest using the most common name, even if it is not the most appropriate/accurate, as long as the more appropriate name(s) and whatever debates surround them are mentioned in the article.  Using the most common name as the heading means that it will be easiest for people to find.

We have the same issue in Assyriology, where the names of many of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings are commonly known by their Hebrew or Greek renditions.  Thus, someone intested in looking up Sargon of Akkad will not likely know that his actual name in Akkadian was Sharrum-kenu and the name of his city was Agade, likewise with many others (Tiglath-pileser=Tukulti-epil-esharra, Nebuchadnezzar=Nabu-kudurri-usur, etc.).

[RJ Senghas]

Why not avoid the "OR" and make it an "AND" as much as possible, referencing all the labels, explaining where they come from, and the pragmatic effects associated with use of each of the terms?  One of the reasons many groups assert the use of their own preferred name is to break stereotyped ideas based on outsiderframes of reference.

So, we certainly do need to refer to the commonly used names to promote access and availability, but where else is any better a place to help reveal the issues of naming but in a CZ article?  Frequent use of the terms used by groups themselves can demonstrate that it is relatively easy to adopt a term.  We don't have to be stuck in our old ways if there are good reasons to change.

That said, often new autonyms are political moves, at times to disassociate groups from histories or individuals that they do not want to be linked to.  Sometimes this is cynically done.  Why not try to use autonyms when it feels useful or respectful, but use other ethnonyms to help us understand other perspectives involved.  For example, we could employ historically-used ethnonyms when describing how, say, the Bureau of Indian Affairs managed what its officers saw as one category of indigenous population, even if that was a naive perspective not held by either the groups, or even anthropologists studying them.

[Joe Quick]

Having thought about this for a while since my initial post, I'm inclined to follow RJ's suggestion: autonyms where useful and respectful and other names when appropriate.  After all, redirects work quite well for guiding people to where they want to be on the wiki.

The important issue, then, is to discuss the origins and implications of the different names.

[Nat Krause]

This is an interesting question; thanks for bringing it up.

It's worth noting that names for different peoples can have a lot of confounding factors with regard to scope. For instance, as far as I'm aware, "Anishinaabe" is indeed one of the autonyms used by the Ojibwe, but it includes other related peoples, as well: the Odawa, the Algonquin, and sometimes the Potawatomi. On other othand, "Inuit" is an autonym, but it has a narrower scope than "Eskimo" does. And, should "Lakota" be treated as an autonym referring to the Sioux as a whole (this seems rare) or to Titonwan branch only?

I think the correct response is not to have a hard-and-fast rule, but to find the correct balance on a case-by-case basis. The article title should be some fairly common name, but, where different options are available, we should tend to favour autonyms. Thus, "Ojibwe" is preferable to "Chippewa". More important than avoiding exonyms, however, in my opinion, is to avoid names that are actually offensive. However, it can be difficult to get a clear picture in that regard. "Eskimo" might be offensive to some Eskimo groups, but not to others. There seems to be conflicting information as to whether the term "San" (referring to indigenous hunter-gatherers of southern Africa) is considered to be offensive or relatively polite ("San" is not an autonym, but a name applied by these peoples by their indigenous neighbours. There doesn't seem to be an autonym in this case).

As for spelling, I would recommend seeking the same sort of balance by using conventional spellings with a preference for those that reflect the native language correctly (preferably according to some standard). In the case of the K'iche', I think that, in particular because the alternative, Quiché, is more of a Spanish convention than an English one, we should use the native spelling.

[Joe Quick]

Good point.  If we write an article titled "Anishinaabe," then we need to make sure that the article is about the whole group and not just Ojibwe or Odawa.  (Algonquin refers to several distinct groups too, doesn't it?  Or am I confusing it with the language family of the same name?)

"Lakota" would have to exclude the Dakota and the Nakota, but "Dakota" is also occasionally used to refer to all three as a group.  We don't want to use "Dakota" for a larger article to avoid confusion, but we certainly don't want to use "Sioux" because of the historically negative connotations the name carries.  There aren't any other choices that I know of, so I suppose we would have to prefer "Dakota" and make use of a disambiguation page (which would also include the states as well as some other topics).

K'iche' is definitely preferred, I think because it is the convention under the standardized Maya alphabet.  This alphabet was standardized by Maya scholars (who are Maya, not just scholars about the Maya) and is a source of ethnic pride so it would seem a no-brainer but such situations can have very serious political consequences (in this case I think we're clear).

This whole situation becomes extraordinarily complicated, so a standard policy is probably a bad idea.  Such issues should probably fall back on the principle of "cultural article relativism" and be decided on a case-by-case basis, but let's make sure that we consider naming conventions and their implications when creating content. 

[Nat Krause]

(Algonquin refers to several distinct groups too, doesn't it?  Or am I confusing it with the language family of the same name?)

Give or take. There's a very important distinction to be made between Algonquin, which is a specific Anishinaabe group from what's now Quebec Province, and Algonquian, the enormous language family.

For "Sioux", perhaps "Oceti Sakowin" is an alternative; but I don't know much about it's exact connotations.

[Joe Quick]

(Algonquin refers to several distinct groups too, doesn't it?  Or am I confusing it with the language family of the same name?)

Give or take. There's a very important distinction to be made between Algonquin, which is a specific Anishinaabe group from what's now Quebec Province, and Algonquian, the enormous language family.

Yep, thanks.  I realized my mistake after having posted, but forgot to come back to fix it.

For "Sioux", perhaps "Oceti Sakowin" is an alternative; but I don't know much about it's exact connotations.

Yeah, maybe.  I haven't seen or heard that name before. 

I guess my point was not really about the specific examples that I was citing, but more about how we should handle things.  I started this thread thinking that we could develop a convention, but I'm realizing more and more that we probably can't reasonably create hard and fast rules for this topic...

[Argyriou]

I think we can create a soft convention to use the English-language common name, with redirects from other-language names and spellings as appropriate. I'd make a partial exception for Pinyin Chinese names, as those have become the common English names mostly - so Beijing instead of Peking, but China instead of Zhongguo.

Name changes made for political reasons should generally not be respected: Burma instead of Myanmar, Ivory Coast instead of Cote d'Ivoire. In these cases, as above, we should have a redirect from the new name to the old, and one with diacritics and one without (so both Côte d'Ivoire and Cote d'Ivoire should redirect to Ivory Coast)

Native American groups are a harder question because the English names don't always correspond well to the actual facts. But there should be an article or redirect at [[Soiux]] (probably an article in that particular case, because of the complex history of the name), [[Shawnee]], and all the rest of the names that those of us who went to school before 1990 learned.

[Joe Quick]

Redirects are important, of course.

But I would tend toward the opposite of your suggestion.  Myanmar is the official name regardless of the motivation behind the switch - use Myanmar.  Côte d'Ivoire is the country's name, not Ivory Coast.

Since redirects allow us to place the actual article under any of the possible names for the subject, I prefer to use the autonym and place redirects at English common names.  The exception would be where autonyms are not traditionally written with the Latin alphabet.  This all depends on the situation, though - there are a lot of unique cases (as noted above).

[RJ Senghas]

Well, certainly any official name needs to be captured by redirects, at the least.  However, why should state-designated definitions necessarily trump usage debates, or control our usage here on a wiki page?  Furthermore, what about situations where the "official" (should I say "officious"?) adoption of names meets local resistance?

I don't think we should adopt naming convention just because a particular government (or other hegemonic enitity) says so.  Remember that the ideal CZ article, according to the [[neutrality policy]] doesn't take positions in controversies, but instead tries to describe and contextualize them.  Of course, the ideal and daily practice are always in tension.  ...Hmmm, didn't Giddens and a bunch of others harp on that a bit? 

[Joe Quick]

Hmm.  So can we make our convention a simple statement of the obvious?: "Choose your title carefully and don't forget to create redirects."

[RJ Senghas]

Perhaps, though we might also indicate that authors can consult with the archives of this forum for previous discussions (including this one) about the issues involved in selection and use of names.

So often, it seems, it talks a lot of work to find the elegant (or at least simple) solution that frequently masks the amount of effort involved.