On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names

Abstract

This paper asks what kind of modifications we might have to make to our conventional understandings of proper names to accommodate the im/propriety of brand names. On the basis of ethnographic research on a naming crisis at a Mumbai advertising agency, I suggest that the classic anthropological notion of ‘participation’ (as opposed to reference) allows us to consider the play between baptism and the mimetic activation of virtual potentials that characterizes the public life of brand names. I argue for moving beyond the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘real’ proper names sustained by the theory of commodity fetishism, and propose instead that the supposed artificiality of brand identities has come to operate as an alibi for the unsteady authenticity of personal identities.

Keywords

• participation
• brand names
• proper names
• reference
• mimesis