Cartographies of Belonging: Reflections on Indigeneity and Autochthony

Abstract

This creative nonfiction reflects upon the political utility of the terms “indigeneity” and “autochthony” to describe human (and non-human) groups as genealogically bound to or originally springing from singular geographies. What do these terms reinscribe, and what might attachments to them foreclose to the Armenian, and more broadly, to the collective human experience? This mix of text and image is a plea to move beyond an “autochthonous” logic that naturalizes the coupling of bodies to lands to account, instead, for a more just and capacious understanding of existence as by, through, and for the in/animate “other” across multiple geographies and timescapes.