In a sweeping history drawn from ethnographies of Southern Africa and the Americas, Susan Ramírez unearths naming practices that hold surprising consistencies despite dramatic differences in time and place. Her tri-continental study proposes that onomastic traditions in oral cultures were mnemonic devices linked to the historical memory of ancestral figures.

Ramírez calls this phenomenon “positional inheritance” after Ian Cunnison's classic anthropological study of the Luapula Valley (29). These practices intertwined the commemoration of ancestors, the performance of political legitimacy, and the formation of symbolic kinship. In three provocative case studies flanked by introductory and conclusion chapters, Ramírez carefully exemplifies how the Lunda people of Southern Africa, the Ho-De’- No-Sau-Nee (Iroquois) of North America, and the Andeans of South America all utilized the conventions of positional inheritance for social and political purposes. Positional inheritance indicates the melding of an ancestral name with a social rank or role. Whomever ascended to the said rank subsequently adopted the ancestral name as his or her own. Consequently, the reputation and legacy of mytho-historical ancestors applied to the contemporary bearers of their names, such that they were one and the same.

The remembrance of individuals who bore such a rank faded with time, but significant deeds, embedded in the connotations of the names themselves, persisted. For example, Europeans in the interior of Southern Africa often conflated “Kazembes,” or rulers, who were, in fact, numerous people who adopted the same name and reputation when rising to the highest rank of the political hierarchy.

Ramírez observes a similar process in the Spanish attempts to record the chronologies of pre-Hispanic Andean sovereigns, who sometimes invoked long-standing legacies by adopting the Inca and Cuzco titles, as well as names like Viracocha, Pachacuti, and Yupanqui. The resulting Spanish confusion over royal lines distorted the written record that purported to document basic details of Andean history, just as it has misguided modern historiography on the subject. As a historian of colonial Latin America, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ramírez's Andean chapter is the strongest both analytically and in its depth of archival research. In a shift from the other chapters, the Andes case study relies not only on colonial ethnographies, but also on an impressive consultation of legal records that trace Indigenous naming conventions among more isolated peoples like the Jayancas.

As in any comparative study among groups with few to no intrinsic historical connections, though, the analysis engenders—indeed necessitates—a degree of abstraction to make these diverse customs intelligible to each other. Although Ramírez encourages her readers to think of these cases as sharing “the same practice” despite being “thousands of miles away and across the ocean,” the search for similitude occasionally hinders the productive exploration of differences among these groups (19, 83). The result allows the analysis to project broader generalizations about the nature of “preliterate societies,” in contrast to its treatment of the development of alphabetic writing and its alleged structural effects on cultural and historical memory (17). And yet, it is precisely this presumptive distinction between “preliterate” and “literate” that heightens the problem of the comparative structure. The text's theoretical grounding in Cunnison, Claude Lévi-Strauss (“hot” and “cold” societies), and other anthropologists of the mid-century relies on classificatory systems about literacy and consequent modes of “linear” and “circular” thinking that a generation of anthropological debate has challenged and decentered (28, 137).

As Ramírez marshals evidence, she makes clear her attentiveness to the historical contingencies and colonial dynamics that localize the three case studies. In this view, the book's most valuable contribution is to the study of ethnographic documentation of oral practices, rather than to the study of orality itself. Ramírez's chief concern is “the generation and use of knowledge as fundamental to understanding and evaluating the knowledge itself” (26). Thus, it is through the refracted gaze from Western ethnographies to Indigenous and African oral cultures that Ramírez's three cases prove most effective for the fields of colonial onomastics and the epistemology of language.