The human urge to name is part of a fundamental need to sort the world into manageable categories that stretches from pre-historic to contemporary times. This need is stretched in contemporary times with the advent of internet based tagging, classification, and mapping systems, including new neogeographical mapping tools fundamentally re-structuring what it means to name in the modern world.

This book explores these developments to provide a cutting edge theoretical and critical analysis of current debates within toponomy. This book examines the use of naming as a primary tool for making sense of complex lifeworlds and livelihood systems, arguing that the concept of the name is inherently spatial and visual in nature. It positions itself at the intersection of traditional approaches to toponymy, that focus on cartographic and technical aspects of place naming, and critical approaches, that examine the political aspect of place name practices, power and people. It opens up new spaces of enquiry beyond these two perspectives to explore the idea of naming as applied to the world at large, focusing on names as referents applied to a range of phenomena including not only places but also people, objects, and abstract ideas. This book provides a naming toolbox that is at one philosophical, religious, political, practical, and scholarly, and contains examples from Canada, the Middle East and the UK and indigenous communities. It will be of great interest to those working in geography, cartography, anthropology, and cultural studies.