The Name Game

Cultural Modernization and First Names

Jurgen Gerhards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780765802972
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351321785
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From decade to decade, significant changes occur in the choice of first names for children. One-time favorites are perceived as old fashioned and replaced by new choices. In The Name Game, Jurgen Gerhards shows that shifts in the choice of names are based on more than arbitrary trends of fashion. Instead, he demonstrates, they are determined by larger currents in cultural modernization. Using classic tools of sociology, Gerhards focuses on changing atterns of first names in Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, using these as an indicator of cultural change. Among the influences he considers are religion, and he notes a trend toward greater secularization in first names. He considers the extent to which Christian names have been displaced, and whether the process is similar for Catholics and Protestants. He traces the impact of different political regimes (Second Empire, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, West Germany, East Germany) and the accompanying rise and fall of German nationalist sentiment. He also investigates the dissolution of the family as a unit of production, and its impact on the naming of children. He shows that the weakening of traditional ties of religion, nation, and family has led to greater individuation and greater receptivity toward foreign first names. Gerhards concludes with a discussion of whether the blurring of gender and sex roles is reflected in the decrease of gender-specific names. Written in a lucid, approachable style, The Name Game will be of interest not only to sociologists and cultural studies specialists, but also non-professionals, especially parents who are interested in reflecting on the process of name giving.

1
Introduction: The Culture of Society

The idea of producing a study of the influence of culture in choosing a first name dates back to an event in 1986. Friends of ours were expecting their first child and were casting about for names. Over food and wine a group of us offered our suggestions. Some were dismissed as too long or too short, others were rejected for being too banal or popular, until finally a name was agreed upon. The criteria governing the selection had not been specified; nonetheless, it was clear to me as an observer that the search process was subject to a structuring principle not solely determined by the individual preferences of the parents-to-be, but which conformed to a logic directly related to the couple’s social status and milieu. Both parents were university graduates whose cultural capital included more than a passing acquaintance with music, literature, and art, thus enabling them to express their taste in a way both acceptable to their social peers and in a way that clearly distinguished them from other milieus. The repertoire of potential first names was thus confined to those acceptable to the parents’ social milieu. Names from films, television, and sports were judged to be vulgar, since they were often used by the lower classes. Old German names like Wilhelm, Uta or Otto were rejected on grounds of being too traditional and otherwise conservative. Jewish names like Sarah or Daniel would have been considered if they hadn’t been used a decade earlier by the same milieu; they were shopworn and did not satisfy the parents’ need to christen their child with something distinctive and individual. The name finally decided upon was Stella.

Let me relate another experience. A few months ago, my two children (Niklas and Hannah) celebrated their birthday with friends. The guests were Maurice, Leon, Anselm, Julius, Lea, Laura, Sarah, Katharina, Jamie, Annabelle, and Henriette. But what had happened to Heinrich, Otto, Josef, Wilhelm, Berta, Erna, Maria, Annegret, and Elizabeth? These names would definitely have cropped up at a birthday party, say in the 1930s. First names have undergone a profound change since then. Erstwhile favorites are now “out.” Names from German-Christian culture are perceived as old fashioned and have been replaced by newfangled ones. This shift is neither arbitrary nor erratic but conforms to patterns that can be posited as social rules.

The social and cultural structures determining the choice of first names is the subject of the present study, but at the same time it will hopefully offer an introduction to cultural sociology. Culture as a category of research has boomed since the “cultural turn” sparked off a revival of cultural sociology in the social sciences and humanities. However, I do not find the premises underlying the “cultural turn” and its implications for research in the area of sociology persuasive. Based on the example of first names, I shall attempt to show that the classic tools of sociology and its scientific-theoretical logic are more than adequate for investigating the culture of a society. I will use classic theories of cultural modernization and try to show which theories and methods can be applied in analyzing cultural change. Based on an analysis of names, I shall attempt to demonstrate a specific interpretation of cultural sociology and explain what characterizes this interpretation.

The “Cultural Turn” and the Problems It Raises

Scholarly interest in “culture” is at an all-time high. In the past fifteen years cultural studies have become a separate discipline, new research foci have developed, and whole faculties have been renamed cultural studies faculties. The various disciplines have undergone a reorientation (for historical studies see Daniel 2001). These institutional and intellectual reshufflings were instigated by a flood of publications endorsing just such a reorientation (for the humanities see articles in Frühwald et al. 1991). These trends have also had an impact on sociology. In 1988, Jeffrey Alexander summed up the theoretical trends in sociology and spoke of the “cultural turn” that had occurred in the social sciences (Alexander 1988).¹ Despite its complex and heterogeneous nature, the “cultural turn” has certain distinguishing traits, very clearly summarized by Andreas Reckwitz (Reckwitz 2000: 15). I will discuss each of them separately.

1. Scientific theory and epistemology are concerned with how knowledge in general and how scientific knowledge in particular is acquired. According to scholars promoting the cultural turn, theories of science were previously based on a mirror theory of knowledge: something out there in the world that can be described and explained by an independent scientific observer. In a critical analysis of this perspective, the “cultural turn” has shown that no category-free observation of the world is possible and that scientific findings are strongly influenced by the categories one uses. The existence of scientific categories is itself a result of a social process that can be depicted through a sociology of knowledge and science. I find three aspects of this premise of the “cultural turn” and the consequent implications for scientific practice debatable. (1) The fact that scientific findings are always category-dependent is by no means a new insight of the “cultural turn.” It had, ironically, been earlier elaborated by advocates of critical rationalism who are now under siege from the “cultural turn.” Only naive empiricists claim that the world can be experienced directly. Statements about the world are statements by subjects who make statements. In discussing the problem of fundamental principles, Karl Popper and others stressed that every science is based on fundamental principles which can be presumed valid if the scientific community as a whole agrees to them.² In critical rationalism the criterion of objectivity is thus replaced by the criterion of intersubjectivity. “Logically speaking, the testing of a theory can be traced back to basic propositions which are defined as fixed first principles…. The empirical basis of science is not absolute. Science is built on marshy land, not solid ground” (Popper 1976: 73, 75). (2) Yet Karl Popper and other critical rationalists do not conclude from the relativity of scientific knowledge that scientific knowledge is arbitrary. Science is the consistent attempt to approach the truth (approximation theory of truth). The logical testing of the consistency of assertions, the disclosure of their underlying operative assumptions, and the precise use of definitions are tools used to achieve this approximate truth. Some scholars of the “cultural turn” draw another practical conclusion from the basic relativity of scientific knowledge which I also find unconvincing. They interpret the relativity of scientific knowledge as an invitation to ignore many “standard” criteria of scientific research; hence the assumptions upon which their studies are based are often insufficiently explained, the terms fuzzy, and the statements rarely empirically tested. (3) The fundamental dependence of scientific knowledge on categories still does not imply that this has any significant impact on concrete research. The path from scientific assumptions to concrete research topics is usually a long one, and general premises are only reflected to a limited degree in specific research (see Alexander 1987). This merely indirect link between general scientific principles and concrete empirical research is often ignored by scientific theorists. If, say, we are interested in whether and when the first names of monarchs and princes are adopted by the masses and we empirically analyze this based on the diffusion of princes’ names following coronation, then I do not see what kind of fundamental scientific assumptions need here be taken into consideration.

2. The focus of every sociological analysis is to reveal the meanings behind a person’s actions. The meanings of actions are not simply the idiosyncratic, subjective meanings of one acting subject, but are the result of interactions with other people and have the status of collective-meaning systems, world images, ideas, codes, schemata, symbolic orders - in a word, they have the status of culture. Proponents of the “cultural turn” claim to have introduced the importance of culture and meaning as a challenge to a mechanistic concept of human behavior and society. This second idea is not bulletproof either. It is correct, of course, to assert that human beings use meaning to define their relationship to the world, and insofar as sociology examines the meaning-systems that underlie our actions it is indeed of a cultural bent. But is this really a novel insight? Do any sociolo gists deny it? Even Émile Durkheim, often accused of being a positivist, perceived man as a creature whose actions were founded on meaning, as we will shortly see. And even rational-choice theories start from the assumption that people choose actions based on their definition of situations and not on the basis of objective facts, and that “frames” shape and limit their behavior (see Esser 1991). Ergo, it is hard to resist the idea that the “scientific counterposition” criticized by advocates of the “cultural turn” is itself their own construct. Of course the rise in German names from the nineteenth century onward cannot be interpreted as a mechanistic phenomenon. The development is linked to the rise of nationalism in Germany as a collective-meaning system; and the decline of a transcendent interpretation of the world (secularization) is reflected in the decline in Christian names. An analysis of first names is always concerned with the meanings inhering to those names.

3. Because sociology must take the meaning of behavior into account, advocates of the “cultural turn” have attempted to limit sociology’s competence. They say that sociology—in contrast to the natural sciences—is not in a position to formulate and test hypotheses. According to the “cultural turn,” cultural-sociological analysis consists solely in understanding the subjective meaning of an action on its own specific terms. I’m not persuaded that sociology must limit itself to an interpretive description of social phenomena, it should do this and more. Following a description of the explanadum, the second step should be to explain (explanans) the thing described. The fact that we are dealing with meanings should pose no obstacle. Rainer Schnell, Paul Hill, and Elke Esser (1995a: 91) have given a lucid example of this:

In bar A, person X notices person Y smiling at them, whereupon X approaches Y, invites Y to a beer, etc. In fact, Y’s smile does not “mechanically” move X to action in a way similar to a rise in temperature creating an increase in gas volume, but rather the “smiling” gesture is perhaps interpreted as a sign that Y likes X and would enjoy a conversation. This interpretation is a prerequisite for X’s going over to meet Y. Moreover, it is not just a single symbol but a number of interpreted symbols that generate X’s subjective judgment of the situation. A smile in a late-night bar is different from a malicious smile of a colleague at work after some blunder by X. The same gesture has a different meaning in different situations. In the social context there is also the possibility that symbols, situations and/or milieus have become relatively consolidated and thus are not liable to ever-changing interpretations or (as constantly stressed by the symbolic interactionists) the possibility and necessity of new interpretations of symbols. This latter of course is also liable to a deductive-nomological explanation, for the question as to why X interprets the smile of Y as a sign of being liked can be answered through the explanadum of a learning theory. And such is still basically explicable despite the fact that intended meanings and their imputations are never fully identical. These divergencies call forth various theoretical explanada attempting to make sense of them, as is done in socio-linguistics. (Schnell, Hill, Esser 1995a: 91)

4. The “cultural turn” led to a shift in focus, micro-sociological analyses of everyday phenomena and practices now coming to the fore. Analyses of the creation of meaning in everyday situations is of course not an inevitable result of the first three premises of the “cultural turn,” but it reveals such a tendency. As Karin Knorr Cetina stated in 1988, social reality must be analyzed “from the native’s point of view,” and if one follows this dictum then very soon we find ourselves analyzing everyday practices. The analysis of organizations concentrates less on their formal structures than on the informal quotidian routines of members of organizations and the organizational cultures that emerges therefrom; the traditional class analysis is replaced by “cultural studies” that chiefly depict the everyday routines of the lower orders. Phenomena such as gratitude, shame, passion, and honor thus become objects of cultural-sociological analysis—namely, the description of society as a symbolic practice of its constituent members (Knorr Cetina 1988).

There are no scientific criteria, which can be used to decide whether a research question is a meaningful one or not. So, one cannot really criticize the fact that cultural sociology focuses so much on the study of everyday life phenomena. One can merely draw attention to the gaps that emerge when cultural sociology concentrates solely on an analysis of daily life: it misses the larger macro-sociological connections. A purely micro-based cultural sociology cannot precisely answer the question as to what a society’s culture is. The classic cultural sociologists were interested in the exposition and explication of macro-cultures, for example, people like Max Weber in his work on “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” and “Western Rationalism.” With my analysis of first names I will employ the everyday perspective of the newer cultural sociology, while combining it with a macro-sociological approach. The naming of children as an everyday societal occurrence will be interpreted as an indicator of both macro-cultural change and a process of cultural modernization.

5. Implicit in the “cultural turn” is a criticism of standard scholarly methods and a preference for so-called qualitative methods of social research. The basis for this preference is emphasis on the cultural aspect and the meaning dimension of social actions. The “cultural turn” argument is that standard quantitative methods are unable to capture the meaning of actions and interactions; they treat the objects of their research as a world free of meaning (Reckwitz 2000: 27); it is important in empirical analyses to “qualitatively” describe the meanings of human actions. But is this portrayal of quantitative methods and its accompanying critique correct and legitimate? I disagree with the notion that so-called quantitative methods neglect the meaning dimension. The difference between quantitative and qualitative methods is not that one depicts meaning and the other does not; the difference lies in when and how they do it. In quantitative methods the meaning of a person’s attitude in a survey or the meaning of a person’s statement in a newspaper is defined before the data is collected albeit on the basis of a preliminary examination. If, for example, one agrees, in a survey, with the statement that Jews are more corrupt than other people, then this will be taken as an indicator that the respondent holds an anti-Semitic attitude. In qualitative methods the meaning of words is reconstructed after the data has been collected, for example, in an open-ended interview. But both approaches are concerned with sniffing out meaning, and the quantitative methods used here in my analysis of first names will hopefully illustrate that fact. For instance, if parents give their children names of Christian saints then the implicit meaning is that they are expressing their Christian faith; when this practice wanes over time, then I interpret it as a sign of increasing secularization in society. The categories saintly names/other names, in fact, first emerge through attribution of meaning—namely the interpretation of the abandonment of saintly names as an indicator of social secularization. Of course, one can challenge the notion that a decrease in saintly names is indeed an indicator of secularization processes—although one would have to put forth some very cogent arguments. What seems to me indisputable, however, is that this approach is concerned with meaning. Every quantitative approach is to some degree a qualitative one (see Früh 1992). This of course does not mean that there are no differences between qualitative and quantitative methods and that qualitative approaches do not have their place. The choice of which method one uses depends on what one wishes to ascertain. If, as in this study, one is doing an analysis of cultural change and is working at the macro-level, then one must take care that one’s material is representative of the whole of society. This approach perforce has a greater affinity to quantitative methods, that is, controlled random sampling that makes it possible to infer from the sample to the entire population.

To sum up: I, for one, remain skeptical of the “cultural turn” in sociology. One can still employ the classic premises of sociology to work up cultural-sociological questions and answer them empirically, and I would like now to elaborate my own understanding of cultural sociology by discussing the work of Émile Durkheim.

Back to Durkheim: Concepts of Cultural Sociology

In 1895 Émile Durkheim published The Rules of Sociological Method in which he developed his ideas for a science of society. Two years later came his study Suicide, which was intended to demonstrate the methodologies laid out in the prior book. The texts went hand in hand (Lukes 1973: 226) and helped establish sociology as an autonomous discipline. The principles behind Durkheim’s understanding of science in general and his notion of sociology in particular can be reduced to six basic rules: (1) write simply and plainly; (2) define your terms as precisely as possible; (3) make no assertion regarding the real world without funding it on empirical evidence; (4) always examine the plausibility of alternative views and explanations that stand in contradiction to your own theories; (5) the sociologist’s proper subject is human behavior or actions (by which he meant not those of individuals but of a number of individuals who act in the same way); (6) explain human actions within their social context.

Suicide exemplifies Durkheim’s ideas. Not only is the text simply written but Durkheim takes the reader through his argument on a careful step-by-step basis. His terms are precisely defined and empirically grounded. With the help of official statistics from various countries and regions, he attempts to back his assertions of socially determined suicide rates empirically and then prove them through the method of concomitant variations.³ Alternative explanations are extensively discussed and proofed. Above all, Durkheim attempts to refute psychological and physiological explanations of suicide rates and thus create a genuine sociological perspective that does not try to explain individual suicide but rather suicide rat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: The Culture of Society
• 2. Data, Methods, and Research Context
• 3. Secularization Processes and the Dissolution of Religious Ties
• 4. Regime Change and the Rise and Fall of German Names in the Twentieth Century
• 5. Dissolution of Traditional Ties
• 6. Rise of the Individual
• 7. Globalization
• 8. Gender Classification and Changing Sex Roles
• 9. Synopsis: Cultural Developments and First Names
• Bibliography
• Index