When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity

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Abstract
Personal names reflect the tension between social and individual levels of identity; their conferral and subsequent use in address and reference are consequently invested with ideological significance for actors. Exceptions to norms of both conferral and use may be justified in the same ideological terms as are normative practices, so that apparently rigid, local-level norms seem to be elements of a larger, more flexible semiotic complex encompassing norms and exceptions alike. By way of illustration, Greek data reveal an ideology of commemorative naming as reciprocity. This ideology entails choices about whom to recognize as a benefactor, and thereby shows how the existence of a set of rules for the selection of namesakes actually allows the strategic and selective expression of social alignments. In such a system, naming practices allow people to adjust genealogical history and other kinds of formal relationships to current social experience.