The Best Version of Yourself Is Already You
If your name was Juan, what would your life be like?
Until I wondered how I would be different if my name was something else, I failed to realize how my name represented the best version of me.
In the early 20th century, the French ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt wrote a fascinating book, Do Kamo, in which he described the Pre-colonial Canaques and their profoundly different conception of time, space, and personhood. For the Canaque, the self didn’t exist in the traditional western philosophical sense. Maurice wrote, that one’s authentic person is only possible in relation to one’s place within a larger social structure. For the Canaque, our names and the social value they carry are integral parts of who we are.
Without the names we have, we are totally different people. Like the Canaque, my name endows me with what Leenhardt described as august personality.
As Freud and modern neuroscience may accept, my name — like all other sounds, words, images (or in the language of Bertrand Russell, sense data) — is tied to various notions. Our names from a western philosophical perspective are just symbols, or signs to use Ferdinand de Saussure’s term. For the Canaque however, we become the name through these very same associative concepts tied to our names.
