Transgressive practices of self-naming: Marking differences through free name changes in Sweden

From an onomastic perspective, the sub-project studies the self-categorisation people perform by changing their given names. Being the most important linguistic labels for humans, given names, alongside other markers like clothing and habitus, indicate social affiliations and thus make a crucial contribution to human differentiation. As names don't bear any semantics, they are to a high degree suitable for marking forms of social belonging in terms of gender, class, age, religion, ethnicity etc. The rare case of free name change and self-naming that is subject to our study allows for encoding differences in one's own identity; the external categorisation through the name given at birth is replaced by the individual alignment to various social categories. The project aims at examining which categorical affiliations are highlighted through the act of self-naming when the free change of names is legal and even promoted by the state. This is the case in Sweden: The Swedish naming law allows an utmost liberal and comfortable handling of name changes. Contrary to the first project phase, the new project does not want to analyse the self-chosen names according to a previously defined cultural difference. Instead, the focus lies on those social affiliations that are made relevant by the actors themselves, as well as on those affiliations that are made invisible through the name choice (doing & undoing difference).

DFG Programme Research Units

Subproject of FOR 1939:  Un/doing Differences. Practices of Human Differentiation