Plenar 1
Frédéric Giraut, Université de Genève, hållare av UNESCO-professur i inkluderande toponymi "Naming the World".
The Contradictions between Contemporary Place-(re)Naming Imperatives: Standardisation, Inclusiveness, Heritagisation, Branding
The talk addresses the tensions between the contradictory imperatives and trends that prevail in contemporary place names. It explores this topic in various contexts, including a) Western Europe's centralised (France) and federal (Switzerland) linguistic situations, b) postcolonial situations in West and South Africa, and c) the legacy of settler's toponymic colonisation in North America.
The trends in question are those of standardisation, particularly with regard to digital mapping and street addressing policies in rural areas and informal neighbourhoods; heritagisation, focusing on toponymic legacies linked to dominant traditions; inclusiveness, promoting previously invisibilised knowledge, languages and references; and territorial branding, where place names are used as competitive assets.
This overview and contradictory analysis will advocate for Participatory Vernacular Toponymic Diagnostics (PVTD), incorporating local toponymic heritage and evidence-based and/or practice-based toponymic claims.
Plenar 2
Birna Lárusdóttir, Islands universitet.
Place names in the making: Surtsey as an experimental space
Iceland has a long-standing tradition of treating place names as an integral part of cultural heritage, stated clearly under modern law. Yet the practice of naming and safeguarding names is not without its social and political complications.
This talk explores naming processes: how place names come into being, what they reveal about our perception of the world, and how they reflect cultural authority in spatial contexts. Focusing on the island of Surtsey, formed during a volcanic eruption between 1963-1967, it examines how names have been created and recorded over time, providing a rare opportunity to observe the temporal process of naming on a newly formed landscape, a phenomenon seldom documented. The study engages with the conceptual challenge of what is seen as a valid place name, highlighting the fluid and contested nature of naming practices and the dynamics between different cultural groups in asserting, negotiating, or contesting names.
The project is informed by philosophical theories drawn from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, particularly their idea about smooth and striated space which frames the landscape as a dynamic field shaped by human (and more-than-human) action and social organization. Place naming is thus understood not simply as labeling, but as an active process.
Multiple methdologies were used to capture these dynamics, including examining published written sources alongside guestbooks from the scientists’ hut on Surtsey to understand the context of place names in different situations. A field trip was central to the study and involved participatory observation with a group of scientists on the island, thus offering firsthand insights into how place names are formed and used.
By documenting naming processes in a newly formed landscape, this talk contributes to ongoing discussions about the heritage value of names, the role of communities in naming, and how cultural authority and protection of names operate in practice.
