Body-Territory: When We Stop Living in the Body and Begin Belonging to the World

What if our body did not end at the skin?

This question may sound poetic, but it is deeply scientific, political, and existential. For a long time, we were taught to think of the body as an isolated unit: an individual organism separated from land, community, memory, and territory. Yet, when we look at human experience from Latin America, Indigenous peoples, the Damasian Mind, and contemporary neuroscience, we realize that this separation is artificial.

Consciousness does not arise only from abstract thought. It arises from the body in relation. We feel the world before we explain it. Breathing, posture, heartbeat, fear, relaxation, trust, and the presence of others form the basis of conscious experience. In Antonio Damasio’s perspective, the mind is organized through interoception — the perception of the body from within — and proprioception — the perception of the body in movement and position. Thinking, therefore, is not leaving the body. Thinking is the body organizing meaning.

This is where the concept of Body-Territory becomes essential. In many Indigenous Latin American worldviews, the body is not simply “in” a territory. The body is a continuation of territory. Territory is not merely land, resource, property, or landscape. It is memory, food, bond, ancestry, language, climate, care, and condition of existence. As Ailton Krenak teaches, to belong to a place is to be an extension of the landscape, the river, and the mountain. Place is not a neutral background where life happens; it participates in the formation of being.

For this reason, Body-Territory should not be understood as a metaphor. It is a way of understanding life as relation. The body feels territory, and territory leaves marks on the body. We breathe differently in a forest, in a violent city, in a welcoming home, or in front of people we trust. The nervous system changes according to the environment. Posture changes. Attention changes. Breathing changes. The body knows where it is before language organizes that experience into words.

We call this expansion of the body beyond the skin APUS. APUS is extended proprioception: the perception that the body does not end at its anatomical limits, but continues through the environment, the mountain, the water, the forest, the home, the street, and the bonds we inhabit. When a community loses its territory, it does not lose only a piece of land. It loses part of its bodily, affective, and collective orientation. It loses references of belonging. It loses ground.

Experimental neuroscience is beginning to approach this point, although often through a colonial, linear, and individualistic language. Studies using fNIRS/NIRS, EEG, multimodality, and hyperscanning have shown that brains and bodies couple during social interaction, cooperation, caregiving, teaching, music, and collective decision-making. There is neural synchrony between people, changes in prefrontal oxygenation patterns, and shifts in breathing, heart-rate variability, and shared attention. However, science often describes these phenomena as “neural synchrony,” “intersubjective coupling,” or “social coordination,” without fully recognizing that it is measuring something Indigenous peoples have always felt: belonging is bodily.

This is where Jiwasa enters. Jiwasa is when territory stops being only a place and becomes “we.” It does not mean erasing the individual into a mass. On the contrary: in a healthy Jiwasa, each person maintains singularity, critical sense, and the capacity to take leadership at certain moments. A living collective does not erase the individual; it regulates, expands, and situates the person. Leadership does not need to be fixed, authoritarian, or hierarchical. It can emerge according to the needs of the group, as happens in complex systems.

When this belonging is wounded, the brain stops feeling the collective as shelter and begins to perceive it as threat. This is the Wounded Jiwasa. It can emerge from childhood trauma, social violence, abandonment, racism, economic insecurity, territorial destruction, or repeated experiences of not being able to trust others. When this happens, the body enters defense. Interoception closes, proprioception contracts, attention narrows, and the person seeks protection in ideology, money, status, consumption, or artificial belonging. This is the transition to Zone 3: a state in which the body can no longer enjoy, trust, and think with critical freedom.

Territorial fragmentation deepens this process. APUS, once lived as continuity, has been cut into papers: titles, deeds, contracts, debts, guarantees, funds, and financial assets. The mountain became property. Water became concession. Forest became resource. Land became commodity. Living territory was dismembered into documents, and those who control the rules of these documents began to control the flow of life. Thus, the loss of Body-Territory is not only cultural; it is economic, legal, political, and neuroaffective.

Latin American decolonial references help name this wound. Rogério Haesbaert shows that territory, in our reality, must be thought from the body, from the Earth, and from struggles of r-existence. Arturo Escobar proposes understanding territory as ontology — as a mode of existence, not merely as an administered space. Latin American feminist and Indigenous thinkers reinforce that the body is the first territory of struggle, especially when women, Indigenous peoples, and traditional communities face violence against their bodies and lands at the same time.

This reading also expands neuroscience itself. The question is no longer only: “What happens in the individual brain?” It becomes: what kind of territory forms this body? What relations regulate this nervous system? What experiences allow trust, fruition, and metacognition? What environments push the body into defense? What forms of social organization wound or strengthen Jiwasa?

From the Damasian Mind, APUS, and Jiwasa, we can affirm that Body-Territory is a key for reconnecting science, politics, and existence. Consciousness is not an isolated phenomenon inside the skull. It emerges from the body in relation with other bodies, with land, with life cycles, with collective memory, and with the material conditions of survival. For this reason, defending territory is also defending mental health, collective intelligence, and the freedom to feel the world without being captured by fear, debt, or permanent competition.

In the end, perhaps the great modern wound is this: we did not lose only the land. We lost the capacity to feel the whole. The body became function. Territory became paper. The collective became threat. Money became abstract rule. And when this happens, life stops being belonging and becomes dispute.

But Body-Territory is also a possibility of return. It appears when we breathe with presence, when we recognize the ground beneath us, when we feel that we belong to a community, when we perceive that the mountain, the water, the forest, the city, and other bodies are also part of our internal organization. Body-Territory is not something we learn only in books. It is something we remember in the body.

And perhaps this is the first step of a Decolonial Neuroscience: to feel again that thinking is not leaving the world. Thinking is belonging to it more deeply.

References

DAMASIO, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.
Supports the understanding of consciousness as a bodily process grounded in interoception, proprioception, and organism regulation.

ESCOBAR, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Although prior to 2021, it remains fundamental for the idea of pluriverse, autonomy, and territory as world-making.

HAESBAERT, Rogério. “Do corpo-território ao território-corpo (da Terra): contribuições decoloniais.” GEOgraphia, v. 22, n. 48, 2020.
Central reference for articulating body-territory, territory-body of the Earth, and Latin American decolonial thought.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.
Helps frame belonging as continuity between body, river, mountain, memory, and territory.

REINDL, V.; GERLOFF, C.; SCHULTE-RÜTHER, M.; KONRAD, K. Brain-to-brain synchrony in parent-child dyads and the relationship with emotion regulation. NeuroImage, 2022.
Contributes to linking fNIRS/hyperscanning, bonding, emotional regulation, and social synchronization.

DUMAS, G.; MOREAU, Q.; TOGNOLI, E.; KELSO, J. A. S. The human dynamic clamp as a paradigm for social interaction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022.
Helps discuss social interaction, coupling between subjects, and the limits of individualistic models.

FISHBURN, F. A.; MENDOZA, J. K.; HIRSHFIELD, L. M. Hyperscanning and social neuroscience using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Neurophotonics, 2023.
Useful for connecting fNIRS, social interaction, and neural coupling in collective situations.

CRUZ HERNÁNDEZ, Delmy Tania. “Mujeres, cuerpo y territorios: entre la defensa y la desposesión.”
Important reference for body-territory from a Latin American feminist perspective.