Genealogy

Among the Anaañ people in Akwa Ibom State, Southeastern Nigeria, the practice of naming serves as a central mechanism for communicating personal identity, recollecting memory and preserving social hierarchy across generations. The act of naming a child after a revered ancestor or existing relative is a form of moral inheritance that binds the name bearer to certain virtues, histories, and expected cultural nuance associated with the namesake. This article investigates the social functions of namesaking and in its role in family inheritance amongst the Anaañ people. This study examines the rituals, ceremonies, and narratives associated with namesaking, and further analyses the intergenerational authority and social status embedded in the practice. The analysis is rooted in social memory theory by Halbwachs (1992), which views names as memory carriers that connect individuals to their nativity and ancestors. Drawing from ethnographic research design, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants who were purposively sampled, the analysis reveals that namesaking and inheritance are interwoven cultural processes that promote social identity, reproduce lineage hierarchies, and individuate the bearer within the social universe of the community. This study concludes that in the Anaañ society namesaking is a symbol of continuity, with specific social expectations, moral obligations and traditional roles tied to the original name-holder.

The world is burgeoning with ever-growing disparities, nation-states are becoming increasingly oppressive with centrist politics, conflicts are intensifying, and climate change is causing natural disasters, which are increasingly displacing families and children. That is, 473 million children worldwide are living in conflict zones today. By the end of 2023, 47.2 million children had been displaced due to conflict and violence, while natural disasters had driven 26.4 million internal displacements, of which 8.8 million were children This article then responds to the uneven landscapes and dominant imaginaries confronted by contemporary childhoods. In doing so, it locates how children bear the burden of adult agendas in the waiting room of the past, present and future. This lends to the analyses of the wider politics that frame childhoods. In response, the article calls for a conceptual turn in childhood studies urging a radical politics of hope rather than the oppressive politics of tomorrow. It proposes a (re-)imagining of just futures for children whereby adults move from apathy towards childhood reparations and think about what might have been stolen from children and what we may owe them. The paper concludes that any imagination of reparative futures cannot be crafted without children.

Female-child naming represents a unique naming practice among women; yet, there are no current studies examining the interconnectedness between naming female children and gendering among married Bette-Obudu women. This study fills this gap in addition to exploring how Bette-Obudu women, southeastern Nigeria, use the names they assign to their daughters to dominate the “home space”. Ethnographic data were collected through semi-structured interviews from twenty-five purposively selected female-name-givers. Ethnolinguistic data of gendered names, within the Bette-Obudu anthroponomastic tradition, were investigated from the socio-onomastic perspective. This theory provides insights into the sociocultural and contextual meanings of names. The study aims to reveal that female-Bette names, such as Úbékpí (I will marry by force) and Ùngiéáwhúkyémá (The wife dominates her husband), among others, exemplify how mothers bestow names to their daughters to navigate patriarchal oppression and marginalisation, highlighting the concept of female space within the institution of marriage. Essentially, such names denote name-givers’ calculated effort to resist oppressive patriarchal regimes. This study increases understanding of how female-naming in the Bette-Obudu onomastics functions as an effectively subversive discourse against patriarchy by drawing scholars’ attention to the under-explored status of female-naming among Bette-Obudu women.