I think that people writ large don't realize how culturally specific pretty much every part of state-sanctioned identification of a person really is, or how recently they were introduced. Most people in my family have at least two names used for outsiders (in two, or three really but two written languages), and two birthdates, because the Communist Party of China decrees the Gregorian Calendar as the one calendar means nothing to most of the country who has been on the lunar calendar since god knows when and aren't about to change. As a result when I still used facebook I'd get a flood of happy birthdays on a date that isn't my birthday but thankfully all it ever led to was an excuse for someone else to buy my drinks for once. And I feel like everyone who's a minority or speaks with an accent that is clearly foreign gets asked "what's your real name" like "where are you really from" which is by this time a sort of joke since my mom decided to call me Jim and that was really that, which is how everyone pretty much gets named, except it's not endorsed on some official form, but even if you speak Chinese, Mandarin is essentially mutually untelligible from my native dialect which means that even the official manner of pronouncing my name is a foreign one, and not even all 80 million speakers of the language family speaks a version that is understandable to where I'm from specifically (maybe half that number can). And the manner by which one refers to each other is culturally specific so that the given-name surname construction is entirely unknown, full stop, but one never refers to another with just their given name unless they are at a level of family that is... not immediate, but within 2 degrees of removal (my cousins and second cousins, basically), and any other person using it would be gauche at least if not outright rude, but even that is a regionalism.
All that is to say that a fixed name like the concept of a fixed nation of people or fixed any label is in a sense an artifice, something the high modernist state would demand but in reality only exists insofar as official paperwork demands it. All of the patronyms used in Europe that is treated as permanent surnames today, which exists from the Anglo-Normans in Ireland to the west to Norwy and Sweden to the east, southwards to the Dutch and into some German speaking areas, turned what was temporarily useful into something quite useless - from a disambiguation into something that creates confusion. When a name like John Fitzgerald Kennedy still had the meaning of John, son of Gerald, Kennedy, it at least in the community the person lived in, probably signifies that it was necessary to demarcate that. FitzRoy might be a mark of bastardy but, at least for Charles II's offspring, titles and social standing, even though really they were commoners like everyone else. The creation and proliferation of fixed names is invented by states and bureaucracies that needed to make permanent something inherently in flux, and yet, somehow, even after hundreds of years it more or less haven't succeeded beyond a self-congratulatory veneer. The people will do what people do. I've spent 12 years living with someone who essentially never uses her legal first name, had her legal surname changed 4-5 times due to her mother's remarriages, and didn't settle on just reverting back to her (deceased) father's surname until she needed her driver's license. 12 years later my parents don't know her legal name, and it doesn't matter really, because she so seldom uses it in conversation. Hell, my cousin spent 6 years as "Pete Rose" and my family lives in Nevada. He doesn't even watch baseball, and I had to explain to him the irony. He goes by Bob now. I'm just glad that I ended up with my mom's surname out of an odd tradition in my family because the last thing I need is a last name that is two letters long that nobody can say, according to my cousin who grew up in Montreal with the name - Xu. The Anglos and the French do mispronounce it differently though, so there's that.
The reference to “people I went to high school with” was a, perhaps clumsy, reference to how names and usage can vary in immigrant and diverse communities, just as you’ve discussed.
Despite that, the idea that a single “real” name should reign supreme (or is uniquely legal, correct, or valid — with everything else a shady a/k/a) seems to be a growing, rather than shrinking, assumption and therefore a potential stumbling block.
Cultural literacy and listening are key, and a “name” should never be a substitute for a broader understanding of the subject of your research.
Yeah, what is galling is that a lot of times the assumptions are made by people who know that they can simply say "I don't know", and it would be fine. I still remember my evidence professor saying on the first day of class that "your hunches, guesses, assumption without any basis in actual knowledge, or imagination are not evidence of anything" but I have an RSS feed set up full of PACER dockets where nonsensical cases are being argued based on not actual evidence but assumptions that are simply put, false. But I guess the benefits of having gone to a liberal arts college is that instead of facepalming I can at least turn to Yeats, in 1915:
I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
Although even he changed his mind after the Easter Rising, but by then he knew a thing or two about the war that had happened and can see the conflicts on the horizon. Forget not that Rupert Brooke never saw combat, but Wilfred Owen did, and perished in it.
I think that people writ large don't realize how culturally specific pretty much every part of state-sanctioned identification of a person really is, or how recently they were introduced. Most people in my family have at least two names used for outsiders (in two, or three really but two written languages), and two birthdates, because the Communist Party of China decrees the Gregorian Calendar as the one calendar means nothing to most of the country who has been on the lunar calendar since god knows when and aren't about to change. As a result when I still used facebook I'd get a flood of happy birthdays on a date that isn't my birthday but thankfully all it ever led to was an excuse for someone else to buy my drinks for once. And I feel like everyone who's a minority or speaks with an accent that is clearly foreign gets asked "what's your real name" like "where are you really from" which is by this time a sort of joke since my mom decided to call me Jim and that was really that, which is how everyone pretty much gets named, except it's not endorsed on some official form, but even if you speak Chinese, Mandarin is essentially mutually untelligible from my native dialect which means that even the official manner of pronouncing my name is a foreign one, and not even all 80 million speakers of the language family speaks a version that is understandable to where I'm from specifically (maybe half that number can). And the manner by which one refers to each other is culturally specific so that the given-name surname construction is entirely unknown, full stop, but one never refers to another with just their given name unless they are at a level of family that is... not immediate, but within 2 degrees of removal (my cousins and second cousins, basically), and any other person using it would be gauche at least if not outright rude, but even that is a regionalism.
All that is to say that a fixed name like the concept of a fixed nation of people or fixed any label is in a sense an artifice, something the high modernist state would demand but in reality only exists insofar as official paperwork demands it. All of the patronyms used in Europe that is treated as permanent surnames today, which exists from the Anglo-Normans in Ireland to the west to Norwy and Sweden to the east, southwards to the Dutch and into some German speaking areas, turned what was temporarily useful into something quite useless - from a disambiguation into something that creates confusion. When a name like John Fitzgerald Kennedy still had the meaning of John, son of Gerald, Kennedy, it at least in the community the person lived in, probably signifies that it was necessary to demarcate that. FitzRoy might be a mark of bastardy but, at least for Charles II's offspring, titles and social standing, even though really they were commoners like everyone else. The creation and proliferation of fixed names is invented by states and bureaucracies that needed to make permanent something inherently in flux, and yet, somehow, even after hundreds of years it more or less haven't succeeded beyond a self-congratulatory veneer. The people will do what people do. I've spent 12 years living with someone who essentially never uses her legal first name, had her legal surname changed 4-5 times due to her mother's remarriages, and didn't settle on just reverting back to her (deceased) father's surname until she needed her driver's license. 12 years later my parents don't know her legal name, and it doesn't matter really, because she so seldom uses it in conversation. Hell, my cousin spent 6 years as "Pete Rose" and my family lives in Nevada. He doesn't even watch baseball, and I had to explain to him the irony. He goes by Bob now. I'm just glad that I ended up with my mom's surname out of an odd tradition in my family because the last thing I need is a last name that is two letters long that nobody can say, according to my cousin who grew up in Montreal with the name - Xu. The Anglos and the French do mispronounce it differently though, so there's that.
The reference to “people I went to high school with” was a, perhaps clumsy, reference to how names and usage can vary in immigrant and diverse communities, just as you’ve discussed.
Despite that, the idea that a single “real” name should reign supreme (or is uniquely legal, correct, or valid — with everything else a shady a/k/a) seems to be a growing, rather than shrinking, assumption and therefore a potential stumbling block.
Cultural literacy and listening are key, and a “name” should never be a substitute for a broader understanding of the subject of your research.
All of which is to say, interesting, and I agree.
Yeah, what is galling is that a lot of times the assumptions are made by people who know that they can simply say "I don't know", and it would be fine. I still remember my evidence professor saying on the first day of class that "your hunches, guesses, assumption without any basis in actual knowledge, or imagination are not evidence of anything" but I have an RSS feed set up full of PACER dockets where nonsensical cases are being argued based on not actual evidence but assumptions that are simply put, false. But I guess the benefits of having gone to a liberal arts college is that instead of facepalming I can at least turn to Yeats, in 1915:
I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
Although even he changed his mind after the Easter Rising, but by then he knew a thing or two about the war that had happened and can see the conflicts on the horizon. Forget not that Rupert Brooke never saw combat, but Wilfred Owen did, and perished in it.