From the Spell of a Name to the Fear of a Name: Tourism and Identity

The associative potential stemming from names makes them a powerful ideological and political tool. By the same token, such a resource can do magic when it comes to tourist sites and their identity. Far from simply designating a location, names pepper visitors’ imagination with a myriad of narratives that mould the profile of places and arouse curiosity. To a considerable extent, the wonder comes from the language gravitating around names with the meanings it may trigger. From an ideological point of view, in recent years, the study of place naming has undergone a significant renaissance, as shown by the emergence of a critical literature that explores the social context and ideological dimensions of geographical naming. Within this critical turn in toponymic studies, the relevance of place (re)naming as a social negotiation process is especially evident in times of political change, when collective memories—and the names celebrated with them—often stem from manipulating rather than recording the past in order to create or mould the present (Azaryahu 1996). Accordingly, the social function of memory is brought to the fore, as it lays the foundation of the traditions to be invented (Hobsbawm 1983), the historical events to be re-enacted and the narratives to be promoted. These commemorative decisions, which are strategic to setting new political agendas, have also become part of the narratives embedded in so-called cultural tourism. This kind of tourism largely relies on the historical and cultural traditions of places by pointing to selected events of their past that legitimize their present value in terms of cultural continuity, making them worth visiting. As tourism increasingly comes to be associated with an “ideological framing of history and tradition for commercial purposes” (MacCannel 1992, 1), names may become part of this framing and be discursively construed along lines that are drawn by the social and economic drives of local communities. The present chapter explores the discursive function of place names in shaping the identity of tourist sites, considering how they interact with the verbal environment around them in a sample selection of texts. The point being made is that mundane processes of using names, with their quality of constant reiteration, contribute to building up and stabilizing the ascribed properties of a place, hence its “meaning.” Following some considerations on the discursive construction of names, the chapter will focus on the names of two places, namely Salem (Massachusetts, USA), nicknamed “Witch City,” and Colobraro (Basilicata, Italy), renowned for being unmentionable given the bad luck associated with its name. The analysis points to the meanings conveyed by the two names discussed and to the identity they shape for tourism purposes. The closing section offers some remarks on the embeddedness of place-names in the discursive fabric of communities.