Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)

• Main Author: Sean Dowdy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud 2015-10-01
• Series: South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
• Subjects: taboo; names; cosmology; naming; conspecificity; friendship
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4027

This article explores the cosmological entailments of a minor verbal taboo in Mayong (Central Assam). In brief, individuals who share personal names are forbidden from addressing or referring to each other by name, and instead must interpellate each other as mita (friend). Through an analysis of names in acts of sorcery and magic, a baptism ceremonial, and nominal modes of address in Mayong, this article demonstrates how confronting a person with a shared name is tantamount to confronting one’s own singular destiny in another body and another time. Alongside an ethnographic theorization of taboo that bridges the unmentionable and untouchable divide, this article further demonstrates how the euphemistic norm of address between name sharers reframes the distinction between kinship and friendship as a matter of with whom one can and should share a mutual destiny.