Marriage, naming and the state

Abstract

A name is not merely a personal identifier but an object over which state and corporate bodies regard themselves as having the right of control. In the modern state, ideologies of citizenship, ethnocentrism, colonialism, have long entailed the manipulation of personal names. The married change-name is, among other things, a psychological act, an imprinting by society on the (bride-bridegroom) initiate’s consciousness. A newly-coined married name encodes new information about the man or woman. It connotes primarily that a new social relationship has occurred. A new name is a symbol of allegiance to a new person, a new nexus of relations, a starting-over. Fufu bessei is the practice in Japan of the retention of former surnames after marriage. Retention of the surname is a ruptus in traditional symbolic reference, a social and psychological discontinuity. A review of global practice regarding post-marriage naming reveals no uniformity but rather variation. At the same time, there appears to be many possible reasons why an individual decides to change or not to change. Marriage name-change/name-retention thus comprise an ideological speech-act: a linguistic expression of a form of consciousness which sustains and legitimates a state of affairs or which, conversely, indicates rejection of particular practices and institutions.