Drawing, toponymy, and linguistic pilgrimage

ABSTRACT

This article scrutinises an ongoing concern with how the naming of landscape is informed by micro personal and macro cultural narratives. The author takes the position of a toponymist and linguistic pilgrim. The perspectives identify ways of understanding the meanings of place ascribed through language and placenames, the role of intention in language documentation, and relationships between the affect of place and belonging. Drawing is melded with processes of placenaming, specifically a single fishing ground placename recorded during linguistic fieldwork in February 2008 with an elderly man on Norfolk Island, South Pacific. The argument uses drawing as a method to reveal how elicited stories can reveal the meanings of placenames and the histories of observations that inform them. The view taken questions whether the discipline of toponymy could incorporate a more involved and evolved aesthetic dimension. New ways to contextualise observations about placenaming and documentation within relevant interdisciplinary contexts such as drawing research and cartography are offered.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• cartography
• language and drawing
• linguistic landscapes
• Norfolk Island
• spatial writing

Acknowledgement

A nascent version of this paper was presented on 1 October 2015 at the inaugural Drawing International Brisbane conference at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. I thank Bill Platz for his belief in the value of this article. Tom Sapienza provided helpful suggestions and cartography assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joshua Nash is an islophilic generalist working on the toponymy of Pitcairn Island. His research intersects ethnography, the anthropology of religion, architecture, pilgrimage studies, and language documentation. He has conducted linguistic fieldwork on Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, South Pacific, Kangaroo Island, South Australia, and New Zealand, environmental and ethnographic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India, and architectural research in outback Australia. He is concerned with philosophical and ontological foundations of language and place.