NAMING AS A DYNAMIC PROCESS

Abstract

This article aims to further Uhlenbeck's study of Javanese socio-linguistic classification of names by discussing how naming practices are held in everyday life and ritual social contexts. Paying attention to Javanese myth and life cycle rituals – especially those concerning birth – enables a better understanding of the naming process, in its evolution and transformation to current practice. It shows that the Javanese are consistent in their naming practices without loss of creativity in their improvisation.

Notes

¹Fieldwork and secondary data are based on Central Java, particularly the Yogyakarta region. Naming practices may differ slightly in Eastern Java or North coast Java, and in Javanese-speaking regions that are less influenced by the cultural influence of royal palaces. Fieldwork was conducted between 2008 and 2010.

²The corpus he uses dates from 1945 to 1950.

³He does not give much explanation on the different categories. However I give some elements below on the link between social levels and Javanese speech levels.

⁴We can also find this in Toraja society (Koubi 1999: 131), Northern Laos Taï-dam group (pers. comm. from Natacha Collomb), and the Malays (Massard-Vincent 1999: 12).

⁵Referring to birth.

⁶The choice of negatives names is a widespread practice in Southeast Asia. It aims to divert the attention of malevolent entities or influences towards the child. Anne Guillou (1999: 261) gives examples for Cambodia with common names like ‘Cooking pot’, or pejorative ones such as ‘Dog’ or ‘Pig’.

⁷We find a similar process in Cambodia (Guillou 1999: 251) with the use of Sanskrit then Pali for personal names reserved for high social classes.

⁸It differs from Cambodian pet names which is the last syllable of the name (Guillou 1999: 258).

⁹This has since changed from when Ulhenbeck wrote about it.

¹⁰Macdonald (2010) argues that naming system cannot be interpreted according to one kind of name (teknonyms in this case).

¹¹For more details on Javanese kinship, see Koentjaraningrat (1984).

¹²Euphonic names are current in Java as in Cambodia (Guillou 1999: 249).

¹³As are Malay peninsular names (see Massard-Vincent 1999: 196), but not Bugis (Pelras 1999: 175), Cambodians (Guillou 1999: 254) or Burmese (Brac 1999: 229).

¹⁴This conception is broadly spread in Southeast Asia (Massard-Vincent 1999: 13), notably amongst the Malays (Massard-Vincent 1999: 209), Bugis (Pelras 1999: 169–71), Cambodians (Guillou 1999: 262) and the Savunese (Duggan 2008: 109).

¹⁵By Nusantarian, I mean of local origin, probably pre-Indianised or at least not influenced by the Sanskrit or Arabic onomastics.

¹⁶Reid and Macdonald (2010: 5–6) note the introduction in the early 20th century of European first names for the children of Sino-Javanese families which is also common among certain groups of Southeast Asians and other Chinese diasporas.

¹⁷Effects of civil administration on naming patterns are recurrent. See Macdonald (2010: 81) on the Palawan in the Philippines.

¹⁸Naming according to age categories is not consistent in Indonesia. The Bugis do not apply such a rule, for instance (Pelras 1999: 173), whereas it is applied in Savu (Duggan 2008: 108).

¹⁹Stephen Headley (2004: 75) has shown how this elder-younger dichotomy is structured in Javanese kinship.

²⁰On Javanese kanuragan and Mbah Budi, see de Grave (2001).

²¹I had personal experience on a field trip when one morning I was approached by a neighbour and his pregnant wife. The husband asked if they could have some green mangoes on my tree. He said his wife was hankering for them.

²²Delicacy with rice flour presented with sweet water and coconut milk.

²³Another name for slametan; in both cases, the word designates the meal and the ceremony.

²⁴Both blood and umbilical cord are also considered as ‘siblings’ even if of less importance. In some cases, the umbilical cord is traditionally kept by the mother for the child until he or she has become an adult.

²⁵While Koentjaraningrat (1984) states the babaran ceremony would have been rarer in the 1980s, Headley (2004: 99–101) often witnessed it in the Surakarta area and I frequently saw ari-ari night lanterns in Yogyakarta. For another description of the babaran recollected in the 1950s, see Geertz (1960: 46); he calls the birth slametan babaran, Koentjaraningrat (1984: 104) calls it brokohan. In a broader Austronesian perspective (or Nusantarian, at least), in Savu, a newborn baby's placenta is suspended in a particular tree [possibly nitas (sterculia foetida), kèbo (morinda tomentosa), or a tamarind tree – pers. comm. Duggan] and not buried. As in Java, it is also considered the younger sibling and it accompanies the person throughout his or her life (pers. comm. Duggan.).

²⁶The slametan of the seventh day used to be performed by the more fervent Muslims (santri) and is called kekah, from the Arabic ‘aqiqah (‘to cut’; Koentjaraningrat 1984: 104, 354, 395), referring to cutting the baby's hair. Mbah Budi's knowledge and teaching though deeply kejawèn is obviously influenced by Sufi elements (see de Grave 2001: 21–144), which might explain the convergence of a kejawèn ceremony with a Muslim ritual calendar, along with recent trends of the kejawèn ritual activities.

²⁷A birth slametan can also be held on the fifth day after birth, it is called slametan nyepasari (from sepasar, ‘five days’). According to Koentjaraningrat (1984), it has frequently converged with the slametan kekah of the seventh day, but for kejawèn people in that case the ceremony is centred on the haircut and not on the animal sacrifice as it is for the Muslims. The nyepasari was also an occasion to give the baby a name (Koentjaraningrat 1984: 354) and this was the case in the hamlet where Miyazaki (1988: 55) did his fieldwork.

²⁸Large bell-shaped coop without a base which is placed on the ground.

²⁹Berthe shows that the local systems were previously certainly characterised by a very localised alliance system. His hypothesis is that the formation of the Javanese cognatic kinship is tied to political centralism, itself tied to the centralised irrigation of rice fields during the period of Indianisation. This socio-political and technical process would have weakened the previous kinship and alliance relationship, breaking the autonomous character of systems localised in space, produced an impermanence of implied kinship groups, and induced a lack of genealogical depth.

³⁰An alternative is to look at the naming process of Javanese santri which could be the subject of another study.