Personal names and identity

In all societies, personal names are important as a means for recognizing and distinguishing people. The paper, following Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theories on how people systematize the surrounding world through named categories, focuses on how we use names to gain knowledge about who a person “is”. We base our conclusions on culturally shared knowledge about how specific names are related to gender, age, ethnicity, and so on. The paper ends with a discussion on names used in virtual settings, like on-line computer games and web communities, which is an area of great interest for further studies