Naming as Performative Ritual

Naming is a ritual: a mode of address offered or imposed by someone that accounts for the ideological constitution of the subject and constructs its positionality in the social order. A name gives an individual a symbolic marker by which to categorise him or herself and be recognised in society. According to Mircea Eliade (1996: 198), every ritual has a divine model, an archetype. For Eliade, rituals are uniquely and fundamentally divine; the sacred contains all reality, or value, and other things acquire reality only to the extent that they participate in the sacred. In Eliade's view, ritual is the (social) mirror or repetition of a pre-eminent divine event; mankind's ‘religious calendar commemorates, in the space of a year, all the cosmogonic phases which took place ab origine’ (1996: 198). The view that humankind simply repeats the act of Creation pertains to the way in which hagiographic accounts are often understood, in so far as when individuals receive accounts of saints' lives, they are viewing essentially the result of a sliding scale of mobility towards the sacred, as a presentation of divine providence. Eliade acknowledges also, however, that the sacred can never be cleaved from the social, the linguistic, and the economic through which it is made manifest, writing that: