Naming the Animals: Language, Culture and Learning 1

Abstract

Using the story of Adam naming the animals from Genesis 2 as a starting
point, this article explores a theology of culture by reflecting on the
significance of naming in relation to linguistics, the arts and sciences.
Culture-making is seen to be a central aspect, theologically, of being
human and the bounded freedom of human beings within God's provision
and intention is asserted. In this article similarities and parallels are
drawn between learning, the arts and the sciences as elements of culture-
making and we note the key position of language in these areas of
endeavour. We also note how some spiritual practice shares a common
ancestry with some of these things. In reflecting on the necessarily
communal dimensions of naming, we are drawn to relate it to the image
and likeness of God and the relationship of language, communication and
God's love.

In The name of the wind, Patrick Rothfuss , has at the heart of the novel, as the main
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backdrop and setting, a university. And at the heart of that university is a library.
The library is huge and sprawling and has existed for centuries, the collection
growing all the time. It’s also subterranean, going down many levels and some
people never get to the bottom, including the chief librarians, who come and go over
time as deaths, resignations and coups de bibliotheque occur. What is amusing
about it and which therefore sticks in the memory is the wars of classification which
have occurred. Each chief librarian has their particular preference or ideas for a
classification scheme and sets about reclassifying the collection. Naturally, each re-
classification takes years for such a huge collection. In fact so much so that no
reclassification process is ever completed before a new librarian is appointed and
begins their own reclassification project. During the story we catch glimpses of junior
librarians still working on the previous or even previous but one reclassification
because they have not heard of the change or are actually committed to another
scheme. Rothfuss’ book, apart from giving an amusing reflection on classification, is
about another kind of classification: the naming power of words in that universe to
effect physical changes directly in the world and although this article is not about

1This article is based on and expanded from a lecture given to the Librarians' Christian Fellowship in
April 2009 at St Nicholas' Church, Nottingham. I make grateful acknowledgement to Robert Foster of
LCF for transcribing the lecture upon which this article is based.

2 Rothfuss, Patrick. The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles, Day 1). DAW Trade, 2009
such magical reality, it is about naming and the human world.

Adam naming

In Genesis God is portrayed placing Adam in the Garden:

From out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field, every bird
of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And
whatever the man called every living creature that was its name. The man gave
names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field.
But for the man there was no helper as his partner . 3

The last sentence reminds us that this text is mainly leading us to the account
of the creation of the pinnacle of creation -Woman. However, here we concentrate
on a reflection on the picture of Adam giving names.

Naming seems to me to imply, in one sense, contemplation. If you want to

name something, that is to give a name, you have to sense it, feel it, hear it, taste it,
move with it, smell it and/or look at it. You have to become familiar with it as a whole
entity and you have to see it in relationship to other things and decide just what
those relationships are. If you are doing that, you are in a sense, contemplating.
One of the things that people may be encouraged to try as part of spiritual practice
might be to meditate by focusing on a particular object for a time and quietly notice it,
be attentive to it, to get to know it, in other words to contemplate it. This kind of
becoming aware of something is a first step in naming. In the Genesis story we see
Adam as the one who contemplates what God brings before him. It is a spiritual
activity, and it has this sense of trying to see things for what they are according to
our abilities.

We need to remember at this point that naming is not something that happens in
isolation: one object; one label. First of all we have to decide what the 'object'
actually is. Let's take a simple example of the actual difficulty of distinguishing an
object for naming that otherwise tends to seem entirely natural and unproblematic.
The word which we may translate into English from some languages as 'hand' may
actually in some cases also normally includes in its meaning what we would label
'forearm'. We English speakers would not consider 'hand/forearm to be a single
'object', but that is by no means a universal or 'natural' classification.

Secondly, naming also relates to how we group things together or distinguish things
from other things. If we label something as a 'finch', that is sufficient to distinguish it
from 'warblers' or 'buntings' or 'sparrows'. But if we put it alongside certain other
birds, we might want to look for further distinctions and name further using labels
such as 'chaffinch' or 'bullfinch'. And as a further example, I'd invite you to reflect on
3 Genesis 2:19-20, NRSV.
the relationships between 'whales', 'dolphins', 'porpoises', 'fish' and 'mammals'.
Those words are used in various and different ways to both chunk things together
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and to make distinctions.

This story about Adam, then, is also, and by implication, to do with classification or,
to give it a name you may come across in other contexts, taxonomy. Taxonomy
involves seeing the relationships with other things ('seeing' being a generic term –
there are other ways of discerning) but it is also about understanding. It is about
picking out significant features, or what appear to us significant. That in essence is
what classification is: deciding what is significant. Naming then isn’t just about giving
something a label, but rather how we see things, how the labels we choose relate to
the other things we have named and how it all hangs together.

Naming and knowing

Jorge Luis Borges describes a mythical Chinese encyclopaedia called The

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Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, where, he says, animals are divided

into several classifications.

1. Those that belong to the emperor. 2. Embalmed ones. 3. Those that are
trained. 4. Suckling pigs. 5. Mermaids. 6. Fabulous animals. 7. Stray dogs. 8.
Those included in the present classification. 9. Those that tremble as if they were
mad. 10. Innumerable ones. 11. Those drawn with very fine camel hair brush.
12. Others. 13. Those that have just broken a flower vase. 14. Those that from a
long way off look like flies.
Borges is being tongue-in-cheek in making the point that producing a
universal language (the dream of some Enlightenment philosophers as exemplified
by John Wilkes' scheme) may be doomed to failure because of the inherent
perspectival nature of classification. The classification from the Emporium is amusing
because some of the organising principles seem so bizarre. And that is the point:
they are bizarre because we already have a set perspectives that seem so natural
and right to us that some of these are just too exotic for us to take seriously. By
overstating the eccentricity, Borges reminds us that, from some perspectives,
perhaps some of our own principles of classification may seem unlikely, forced or
even strange. The issue is one of cultural perspective: where you are coming from
and the purpose for which we use the information and indeed our emotional
disposition towards it, will affect how something is classified, and therefore affect
how we name things.

4 'Chunking' has taken on the status of something of a technical term in educational conversations.

5Borges, Jorge Luis. . "The Analytical Language of John Wilkes." In Other Inquisitions. New York,
Simon & Schuster, 1952 (1964)
 Our approach to knowledge might be symbolised by the Dewey classification
scheme and related knowledge classification systems. These represent an approach
which arguably enshrines a particular orientation to knowledge based in a western
Enlightenment viewpoint. A number of smaller colleges with specialist subject areas
(such as my own which is concerned with the formation and training of church
leaders) have libraries which use other classification schemes which more attentive
to the focus and preponderance of works in their collection. Similarly we can find
classification systems which are rooted in an Islamic or a Judaic perspective , and of 6

course these schemes pay more attention to the starting points of those faiths and
world views.

One exercise I have sometimes facilitated with groups of people in learning

settings is to put a variety of relatively random images and pictures of varying size,
colour scheme, subject matter and recognisability in front of them and asked them to
group the pictures according to which belong together. It is interesting to see how
differently people went about it. Some grouped them by colour, others by size,
others by whether they are found in the natural world or an 'artificial' world, and so
on. The differing grouping schemes they operated with remind us and illustrate that
classification is perspectival and debatable. Even something as seemingly objective
as the Periodic Table of Elements has its grey areas in this regard: the section
labelled 'noble gases' groups together elements that are only gases at temperatures
well above absolute zero. So the Periodic Table has, as its implicit perspective , the 7

standpoint of ‘room temperature’.

Freedom in naming

Adam, in Genesis, has all the animals brought before him. It is important to note
that this incident in the narrative takes place before what we tend to call the Fall (a
naming or classification which makes less sense in the Hebrew traditions of
interpretation). They are brought before Adam to be given names and that naming
comes before the Fall: the business of classification, of organising how things relate
to each other in one’s head, is not a product of the Fall , but rather an initiative which
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God has taken and wants Adam to do. God is effectively saying “Look at the
varieties here. What do you make of them? How do you see them? How are you
going to classify them?” and this is something to be celebrated rather than rued as a

6 See for example Catherine Buck Morgan, 1996, article at

http://home.usit.net/~cbmorgan/jcpap.htm#sardar accessed 19/07/2009

7 Shirky, Clay . "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." www.shirky.com. 2005. 23 Jul.
2009. <http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html>.

8 Smith, James K. A.. The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational
Hermeneutic. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000.
curse following on from the disobedience of Woman (later Eve) and Adam.

We can see in this an affirmation, from the canon of Scripture, of cultural and
intellectual freedom. With this in mind, we can suppose (within the frame of the
story) that Adam could have classified his world in different way and that would have
been acceptable to God. And it is important to note that if we are right to take this
story as offering insight into the way things are, then this naming /classification is
something which is still going on. We are Adam, God invites us to name not just the
animals but all that has been made and which providence and curiosity bring before
us.

God is just as happy with an Indian classifying in Hindi or Malayalam with the
intellectual and perspectival resources that they offer, as he is with someone naming
in Chinese or any other language or communicative medium. They are permitted by
God to make of it what they will. This contrasts interestingly and significantly with a
similar passage from the Qur'an, which makes the Genesis picture, as I have just
elucidated it, all the more striking.

In Surah 2, verse 31 the Qur'an says “Allah taught Adam all the names of
everything” . This takes us on a rather different trajectory of thought from the
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Genesis version. It seems to me that the Qur'anic version could encourage an

approach to naming, knowing and taxonomy which is all about finding, preserving or
even perhaps imposing a single naming, one way of knowing, a sole taxonomy. In
the Hebrew Bible, in our canon, God allows Adam’s names to stand. Adam names
something ‘and that was its name’. It is not imposed by God on Adam, but instead
God is happy for Adam to have his own ideas and to endorse them. The Genesis
picture is friendly towards the observation that human signs are, in the naming of
semiotics, unmotivated, that is arbitrary.

Freedom and culture

The Genesis story then, is giving us in embryo the ‘namings’ that human
culture brings to us through art and science. Art automatically gives us perspective
from which to view certain things. For example, there is a way of looking at particular
incident from scripture in a piece of art such as we get in the Sistine Chapel, for
example, the artwork offers us particular interpretations. It offers us the fruit of the
contemplations of an artist both of 'a something, of the materials being worked and
the contextual issues of production and sharing. A work of art, in a sense, offers us
a ‘name’ for something. It is in a sense a kind of name in itself: a 'name' that is a

9 An online translation of the Qur'an with commentary can be found at

http://www.muslim.org/english-quran/quran.htm It is interesting to note that the commentary given
on the significance of naming actually makes similar points to those in the text above about the
implications of naming for classification
painting, a sculpture, a piece of music, a poem, a novel or a play.

Science, as we have seen with the Periodic Table, names elements in an

attempt to relate them to and differentiate them from each other. This is brought to
attention quite vividly in the example that life sciences have recently undergone a
naming revision which changes Linnaeus' taxonomy bringing in a three-domain
system and in which the debate is still not fully resolved. We have the freedom,
indeed the Biblical encouragement, to do that. The sciences are in many ways an
extension, a systematic and methodologically careful elucidation, of the acts of
contemplation mentioned above which precedes naming.

I believe that human culture is given space through that passage from
Genesis to take different perspectives on the world and that we are encouraged by
God to have diverse cultures because that is a consequence of having different
namings and systems of namings. This passage, then, is a source or starting point
for a theology of culture.

Naming and learning

We are not, however, just thinking about how knowing and thinking can be organised
efficiently: we are inevitably concerned about how information serves human
development. There are teachers, and Christians are among them, who perceive
their task as one of giving information, and the person learning is simply there simply
to receive it. This can be the way that teaching is understood in many churches and
in many less careful readings of the Bible: we are the empty vessels into which the
preacher pours biblical and doctrinal knowledge.

A better starting place for thinking about learning is arguably constructivism.

This is an approach to learning and teaching built on the insight that when people
learn, we do so by constructing our own understanding and knowledge of the world
through experiencing things, reflecting on those experiences, constructing
hypotheses and adapting or cross-referencing to what we already know or suppose
and that as social creatures we tend to do these things socially . 10

An example can be found in the elementary act of language-learning. Each

child, in order to acquire a language, has to hear it, has to develop hypotheses about
what they are hearing, and test them out with other speakers of the language; and
then to grow their own version of the language from the ground up. It seems to me
10 A good introduction to this can be found here: Hein, George E. "Constructivist Learning Theory."
http://www.exploratorium.edu. 22 Oct. 1991. 19 Jul. 2009.
<http://www.exploratorium.edu/ifi/resources/constructivistlearning.html>.. Most explorations of this
idea refer back to a seminal work: L.V. Vigotsky. Thought and Language.Cambridge, MA. MIT
Press, 1962. Vigotsky, importantly for our purposes, notes the integral relationship between
language and learning.
that all knowledge works in this way. We all construct for our own purposes the
knowledge that we are working with. In the Genesis passage, Adam is also learning
and he is expressing his learning as he contemplates these animals. The learning
and the classification are taking place together; they are different aspects to the
same activity. In this passage then we also have a prototypical teaching and learning
situation with Adam as the learner and God the teacher. Note what kind of teacher
God is though: God facilitates Adam's learning by creating conditions for it and
supporting it but not by imposing it on Adam. Not only does this passage give us a
starting point for a theology of culture but also for a theology of education and one
that is markedly more consonant with contemporary insights on pedagogy than with
what many understand to be the traditional model.

God's pleasure in folksonomy

It is hard nowadays to go on the internet without coming across 'tagging' and, related
to that, terms like 'folksonomy'. Tagging refers to ways of labelling things so that you
can come back to them later on and many people will have seen this in relation to
sites like Flickr or Delicious. 'Folksonomy' refers to a bottom-up approach to
taxonomy which is enabled by tagging . Library-style classification is top-down;
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starting with categories and working 'down' to individual entities. My contention is

that bottom-up classification is more in tune with the way God invites us to
understand the world and the things around and that God is excited to see what what
we come up with (if I may put it anthropomorphically without wishing further,
unintended, doctrinal conclusions to be drawn).

In the film Chariots of fire , the Eric Liddell character says “When I run I feel
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His pleasure”, and many of us take pleasure in classifying, making art or naming in
other ways. When we are constructing knowledge and meaning in art, science or any
other way, to use Lidell's language, perhaps we should allow ourselves to sense
that God is looking on in pleasure and even cheering us on as we do it.

One of the liberating aspects of folksonomy is it allows for different viewpoints

and for varied purposes on the part of those using the tags. So it is interesting to
note that when someone in history has made a scientific discovery it is often
because they have stepped out of the perspective or classification they have
inherited . They find a way of seeing meaning, of naming and relating names which
13

11Mathes, Adam . "Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared

Metadata." http://www.adammathes.com. Dec. 2004. 23 Jul. 2009.
<http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html

12 Chariots of Fire. DVD. Directed by Hugh Hudson. 1981; Burbank: Warner Home Video.

13 This is part of the influential thesis of Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1st.
ed., Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1962,
makes even more sense of the world. In diversity is the potential for new namings
and that some of those new namings will allow us to make progress and do things
we couldn’t do before. We must acknowledge, of course, that such an approach can
and has brought evil as well as good, but we should be wary of ceasing to do good
because somebody might do something bad with it.

Naming and creativity

We might draw out something about the image of God from this. In the previous
chapter -Genesis 1, the story portrays it that as God is creating, God is also naming:
'the dark he called night and the light he called day' and so forth. We see that there
are some given structures of the universe, before humanity appeared, and we are
told that, in effect, God has already begun the task of naming and classification; in
fact alongside making things, God is already making meaning. The message of the
chapters taken together might be taken to be that God has involved us in that
14

meaning-making, naming, classification. Some theologians have termed humankind

as ‘co-creators with God’ and that's what we have here. Indeed we can say, further,
15

that we are ‘co-namers’ with God. This gives us considerable dignity, and freedom,
and shows an aspect of how we exhibit the image of God.

The link to God's creating and naming is important for another reason too. As
the argument has been developed so far, it could be understood as advocating
absolutely unrestrained and unboundaried meaning-making on the part of human
beings. We could 'hear' God's “...that was its name” as a charter to 'culturate'
however we like without any moral or ethical limits, for example. However, taking the
two chapters together, it would seem that we are steered to see our naming and
meaning-making -our culturating- as taking place within God's structuring and
naming of the universe and some of what constitutes it. Our naming is not totally
unrestricted; the God-made and God-ordained structures of the universe constrain
us. We are finite and our knowing -our naming- will therefore have limits; there are
things we may just have to accept as given and work with the limitation. There is the
potential for our naming to redefine things in such a way as to lead us beyond proper
limits; perhaps this is part of the point about the prohibition of the tree at the centre of

14 I take the view that the two chapters are substantially from different sources, however their
positioning together should, I believe, be taken as a canonical invitation to reflect on them together
and to allow their insights and perspectives to mutually inform each other.

15 Philip Hefner is usually credited with this term. A good starting point to find our more might be his
article: Hefner, Philip. " Created to be Creators :: Philip Hefner :: Global Spiral ." Transdisciplinarity
and interdisciplinary study of science and religion and unity of knowledge through our global
network :: Metanexus Institute.
http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/8664/Default.aspx (accessed August
23, 2009).
the garden.

On the other hand, this is not the same as saying that we should totally cease
to push at limits or expand boundaries of what is and can be named. We have to be
wary of ending up saying that, because to say so would outlaw both scientific naming
and artistic naming which we have already seen to be within the scope of our
reflection here. Culture-making is free and yet also constrained and we are to learn
to live in the tension.

Note that this is a tension and not a contradiction. It is arguable that creativity
really requires the dialogue between possibility and limitation. That is to say part of
our creativity arises from the struggle with the materials of our art or science not just
from pure idea. For example, a painter and a sculptor might have the same impulse
to represent something, to 'name' something, however, the medium of expression
would make a difference and would be part of the creativity. The way that the
impulse was realised would result in different 'namings'. Perhaps similarly, two
scientists testing a hypothesis might well do so in different ways, or their creativity
may be tried in trying to find an appropriate way to do so which actually does allow
something significant to be deduced; for something to be 'named'.

Naming and community

There is a further dimension to note arising from the story of naming the animals: the
narrative is framed between the intention to find a helper for the man and creating
one. Thus there is a community-forming agenda implicit. The naming of the
creatures is about community building. And this is important because language itself
is communal. A language is always about a community of users of that language; no
single person 'possesses' a language, we can only participate in it with others. The
only time language is not communal is in situations that are derivative of a
communal; being stranded, being the last speaker of a dying language or the first
speaker of an artificial language. So the picture of naming seems to carry a
resonance of also seeking others with whom the ongoing work of and from naming
can be shared. Adam does not find linguistic community with the animals; they
cannot share with him the task of further naming and by implication of partnership in
culture-making.

And here we find that we may share the post-modern questioning of the myth
of the individual genius. If it is the case that naming is ultimately communal, then the
namings of science and art are only possible and appreciable within communities
where they make sense and from which the new namings are ultimately resourced.
A genius may bring some novelty to bear but they rest, if not on the shoulders of
giants, on the resourcing of their communities and cultures.
 'Naming' is other-oriented of necessity and other-oriented in two ways. Firstly,
what is signified by the name is other and, secondly, the receiver of the
communication is other. Adam's naming represents an invitation to transcend the
self; it is grounded in an agapic movement from self to other involving attention to the
other, contemplation of the other, even a degree of entering into the world of the
other.

Good communication involves also understanding something of the

perspective of the persons being communicated with: what can be assumed in
common, what is likely to be less well comprehended. The more that these things
are understood about the receiver of an act of communication, the better that act can
be crafted to fit. Communication is the chief tool of community-building. The picture
of God inviting Adam to name is a picture of God developing God's own likeness in
Adam in the sense of outgoing other-attentiveness. I would not go as far as one
linguist16 in suggesting that God is linguistic: that would be to project into God
something quite contingent in that language is bound up with our finitude because it
has to pick things out for comment and do so in time-bounded ways. However I think
that we could go as far as to suggest that God is communicative and for us being
made in God's image and likeness is expressed in part by our linguistic capabilities.
God is love and communication is a dimension of loving. So even fallen human
communication always carries at least a trace of love, it cannot escape an agapic
foundation. As for communication so with those things that devolve from it such as
culture-making.

We are communicative beings made in the image of a communicating God

and it is on this original goodness that our many dimensions of culture-making -arts,
sciences, learning, building etc- are founded.

Andii Bowsher

Tutor, Practical Theology and Mixed Mode Training

St John's College, Chilwell Lane, Bramcote, Nottingham NG9 3DS
0115 925 3208; Fax: 0700 609 3317
07 876 401 339
Email: a.bowsher@stjohns-nottm.ac.uk

16 Baker, Mark C.. The Polysynthesis Parameter (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax). New York:
Oxford University Press, USA, 1996. P.512