NAMES AND NAMING activities are central to human symbolic and communicative processes. To be human is to name, and be named, and thereby to possess full being and the ability to relate to the world in meaningful ways. In the Bible, God is said to have brought all the newly created animals to the first human, "to see what he would call them" (Gn. 2:19). In all human communities there is thought to be a close relationship between the name of a person or other phenomenon and its character, status, and very being.

Names often have a mysterious quality, whether they refer to sacred beings of a transcendent nature or to humans and other concrete entities. There is power in names, because they both participate in the reality named and give definition and identity to that reality. That is, name and named exist in a...