Hopi personal names and place names encode a wealth of cultural information. Personal names are like haikus: compact poetic images of aesthetic forms or natural events. Place names are guideposts of cosmology, historical consciousness, and cultural practices. This talk addresses some dimensions of Hopitutungwni, Hopi names.

Dr. Peter Whiteley (Curator, North American Ethnology - Anthropology
Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School - Richard Gilder Graduate School) studies Native North American cultures ethnographically and historically. His main focus is the Hopi of northern Arizona, where he began fieldwork in 1980, resulting in four books and monographs: Deliberate Acts: Changing Hopi Culture through the Oraibi Split (University of Arizona Press, 1988), Bacavi: Journey to Reed Springs (Northland Press, 1988), Rethinking Hopi Ethnography (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), and The Orayvi Split: a Hopi Transformation (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 2008). In 2005, his paper Bartering Pahos with the President, on a Hopi diplomatic gift, won the Robert F. Heizer Prize for “best article in the field of ethnohistory.” Current Hopi work includes a collaborative project (funded by the National Science Foundation’s Endangered Languages program) on Hopi place-names and landscape concepts, with the Hopi Office of Cultural Preservation and colleagues at the University of Arizona.