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What’s in a name? In this course, we will explore how naming has long been an essential cultural practice, and yet one that has been increasingly highlighted as a site of contestation, revealing naming as an often unsettled and fraught space. From copyright and branding, to the politics of Latinx, deadnaming and doxing, as well classic spaces of kinship and the religious, this course will move among different ethnographic and conceptual spaces in order to understand the histories and lived worlds of naming. We will examine how naming practices allow us to better think about a number of underlying concerns in language itself, from erasure, topic avoidance, and silence, and will consider how naming is bound to category making, of making people and things animate and inanimate. In attending to the deep asymmetries in the power to designate, we also discuss the practice of refusal of names and the force and violence of anonymity and namelessness.