Autochthony, ethnicity, indigeneity and nationalism: Time-honouring and state-oriented modes of rooting individual-territory-group triads in a globalizing world

Abstract

Recently, proliferating discourses on autochthony and indigeneity have been noted as the flip-side of globalization. Against this backdrop, this article synthesizes insights from studies of nationalism and research on autochthony, explaining how identity formations literally ‘take place’ by conceptualizing ‘autochthony’ — the proclaimed ‘original’ link between individual, territory and group — as the root phenomenon. Two causal logics underlying this autochthonous ethnicity are distinguished, which honour time differently: ‘individualized autochthony’ links the individual, territory and group in such a way that shared culture/descent follow from place of birth/residence within the same present, whereas ‘collectivized autochthony’ inverts this causality on the basis of continuously evoking the same past. The article concludes by distinguishing between ‘indigeneity’ and ‘nationalism’ as alternative modes for targeting the state: whereas indigeneity refers to cases of autochthony that demand special entitlements from the state, nationalism denotes such cases that aim for the very entitlement of the state itself.

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