What’s in a name?

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

A few centuries have passed since Shakespeare had Juliet muse on the power of names, and we are still discussing whether this power is for good or ill. Robert MacFarlane and Roger Deakin are for naming things:

words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.

Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks

Knowing their names, being formally introduced to them, seemed to bring me one step closer to them. It was like meeting people.

Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees

Both writers see the naming of places and other life-forms as essential to belonging, to becoming part of the place and community, “like meeting people”.
Artist, Mark Dion, on the other hand, asks “Why is it important to name things in the natural world?” He argues, in Mark Dion (Phaidon Press), that when items are labelled, catalogued, named, and explained, knowledge becomes verbal over visual and nature is “contained” in genus and species.

For if all knowledge of the natural world is conditioned by institutions of knowledge with their own particular and parochial ways of producing truth, then the real – Nature – is not so much that which appears in representation, as that which remains always outside it.
Mark Dion, Mark Dion

Their disagreements could be rooted in the type and way of naming that they are discussing. Mark Dion is referring to the binomial nomenclature that Linnaeus developed in 1753. Vulpes vulpes for example. This system turns living creatures into easily referenced knowledge. An entire species of beings, leading individual lives across many locations, can become a single entry in a book or a museum. Roger Deakin and Robert MacFarlane, however, are talking about the more descriptive or narrative names we give creatures or places. ‘Red fox’ for instance, to use the same creature.

These two types of naming come from very different motivations. Common names can be very localized, plant names in particular, and can also be confusing – a ‘muskrat’ is not a rat but a relative of the beaver for example – but come from lived experience of place. Latin names can be used by scientists and museums attempting to communicate knowledge that they themselves have not experienced, and to be very specific about species and even sub-species.

Mark Dion’s concern about naming comes from his work, which investigates and critiques the museum and the scientific study of the nonhuman natural world, highlighting its assumptions, problems, and inconsistencies. His concern is that by classifying and listing creatures, plants, rocks for study, we lose sight of the bigger picture – we talk about these things but don’t see them. As nature writers MacFarlane and Deakin are concerned with the connections between human and landscape that observation and lived experience bring.

As Nan Shepherd, walking in the Cairngorms, tells us:

But why should I make a list? It serves no purpose, and they are all in the books. But they are not in the books for me – they are in living encounters, moments of their life that have crossed moments of mine.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Post Script: I’m amused to see that the first-named of the fox genus (and perhaps only-named at the time), vulpes vulpes, is the creature I think of simply as ‘fox’, and that Linnaeus would have thought of as ‘fox’ too. Our childhood knowledge runs deep.