Seeing Territory as Body: APUS, Indigenous Peoples, and Decolonial Neuroscience

Perhaps the most important question for Decolonial Neuroscience is not only: “what does the brain perceive?”
The deeper question is: where does the body learn to perceive from?

In school, science, and modern politics, territory is often treated as an external space: a map, a property, an administrative area, a natural resource. But for many Indigenous peoples of Latin America, territory is not scenery. Territory is body, memory, language, dream, food, ritual, kinship, and continuity of life.

This is where APUS enters: the body beyond the skin. APUS is extended proprioception, the body’s capacity to feel mountain, water, forest, home, street, wind, heat, language, and community as part of its orientation in the world.

To see territory as body is not a weak metaphor. It is a form of intelligence. It means recognizing that the body does not form itself alone inside the head. It forms through ground, water, language, dreams, and the beings that inhabit the same world.

In recent Latin American debates, body-territory appears as a cosmopolitical category, especially in the struggles of Indigenous women in Brazil. It expresses the inseparable relation between people and territory and denounces forms of dispossession that turn bodies and lands into objects of exploitation.

This is central for adolescents. When a young person loses territory, they do not lose only a landscape. They lose bodily references of belonging. They lose ground, rhythm, memory, and future. Anxiety, hyperstimulation, and emptiness do not arise only “inside” the individual. They are often effects of a wounded APUS.

The Wixárika worldview helps us understand this. Recent studies on Wixárika practices, language, and territory show that oral cultures cannot be reduced to written maps or external categories. Johannes Neurath discusses the difficulty of cataloguing the “untranslatable” and observes that Wixárika and neighboring peoples, as oral cultures, often distrust written language as a sufficient way of representing their worlds.

This matters deeply for Decolonial Neuroscience: not all knowledge fits into written words, tables, or protocols. Some knowledge lives in the body, ritual, path, repetition, song, dream, and relation with territory. When science ignores this, it may measure the brain but lose the world that formed that brain.

The Lacandones of Mexico also expand this reading. Long-term collaborative research with the Lacandon Maya in Mensabak, Chiapas, shows the importance of studying cultural practices, ritual landscapes, contemporary life, and community development in dialogue with community members themselves, rather than treating them as external research objects.

Here we find a basic ethical rule: researching Indigenous peoples is not extracting cultural data. It is building relation. It means respecting language, territory, memory, dream, and community authority. Colonial science asks: “what can we collect?” Science in Jiwasa mode asks: “what can we understand together without wounding the territory?”

Language is also territory. Research on dreams and multilingualism shows that exposure to a language during waking life influences its presence in dreams, suggesting that lived worlds continue reorganizing language during sleep.

For BrainLatam2026, this is precious: if the language of territory enters the dream, then dreaming is also body-territory. The mind dreams with the materials that life provides. When an Indigenous language is weakened, we do not lose only vocabulary. We lose a way of dreaming the world.

DANA spirituality can enter here as a secular, neutral spirituality of care. Not to replace Indigenous spiritualities, and not to appropriate them, but to recognize that a Secular State should protect the conditions that allow each people to maintain its relation with language, territory, dream, body, and belonging.

Decolonial Neuroscience must learn to ask better questions. Instead of asking only “which brain area activates when someone sees a landscape?”, we can ask:

what territory taught this body to feel?
what language organizes this memory?
what dream keeps this people in continuity?
what APUS was wounded by colonization, linear schooling, screens, or loss of land?

Experimental research can help, as long as it does not colonize the question. EEG, fNIRS, hyperscanning, ECG, respiration, GSR, and sleep measures can investigate how the body changes before territorial narratives, mother tongues, songs, territory images, conversation circles, and collective practices. But interpretation must move beyond individualism.

If an adolescent listens to a story in an ancestral language and their body changes, we are not seeing only “auditory processing.” We may be seeing APUS. We may be seeing territorial memory. We may be seeing Jiwasa. We may be seeing the body recognize where it comes from.

The decolonial critique is this: science often measures the body as if it were universal, but bodies are formed by different worlds. An urban brain hyperstimulated by screens is not formed by the same APUS as an adolescent growing in relation with river, forest, garden, community language, and collective dreams. This does not mean one is better than the other. It means they are different ecologies of formation.

Recent Latin American work on body-territory, artistic practices, and Indigenous activism shows that the struggle over territory is also ontological and epistemic — a struggle over ways of existing and ways of knowing.

This sentence must sit at the center of the blog:

territory is not only where one lives; it is how one knows.

Seeing territory as body also transforms education. A Decolonial Neuroscience for adolescents should not teach only brain, neuron, and executive function. It should teach that attention depends on territory, memory depends on language, dreaming depends on lived world, creativity depends on APUS, and collective intelligence depends on Jiwasa.

In this sense, Indigenous peoples do not enter as a “cultural theme” for a commemorative week. They enter as epistemological references. They help science perceive what modernity tried to forget: the body thinks with territory.

DANA spirituality, in this context, can function as a secular bridge: it does not impose belief, does not turn Indigenous peoples into decoration, and does not reduce spirituality to institutional religion. It affirms that DNA, body, Earth, dreams, language, and bonds belong to one continuity of care.

In BrainLatam2026 mode, we could propose a study with Latin American adolescents comparing different conditions of belonging: listening to territorial narratives, using a mother tongue or ancestral language, contact with territory images, face-to-face circles, dream reports, breathing, and sense of belonging. We could measure EEG during attention tasks, fNIRS during cooperative interactions, HRV/RMSSD, respiration, GSR, and dream reports. The hypothesis would not be to “prove” a culture, but to investigate how territory, language, and bond modulate attention, memory, and bodily regulation.

The scientific question would be:

when adolescents recognize territory as body, does the brain enter Zone 2 more easily?

This is a powerful question for Brain Bee because it teaches science without pulling young people out of the world. It shows that EEG and fNIRS do not need to serve only individual performance. They can investigate belonging, language, dream, APUS, and shared agency.

Politically, this connects directly to DREX Citizen and AI as a common good. If territory is body, then data, money, school, and technology must return life to territory. It is not enough to protect land on paper while algorithms capture attention, languages disappear, young people lose belonging, and communities are treated as databases.

To see territory as body is to reject the colonial separation between nature, culture, brain, and politics. It is to affirm that the human mind is not born only in the skull. It is born in a world.

And perhaps this is what Indigenous peoples have been teaching for centuries:

territory dreams in the body,
language breathes in memory,
mountain orients posture,
water regulates life,
and “we” only exists when APUS has not been dismembered.

Decolonial Neuroscience begins when science learns to ask with more humility:

what body is this territory forming?

References

Krenak, Ailton. Futuro Ancestral. Companhia das Letras, 2022.
A Latin American reference for territory, ancestry, rivers, mountains, and continuity of life.

Chaves, Kena Azevedo. “Corpo-território, reprodução social e cosmopolítica: reflexões a partir das lutas das mulheres indígenas no Brasil.” Scripta Nova, 2021.
Develops body-territory as a cosmopolitical category linked to Indigenous women’s struggles and the inseparable relation between people and territory.

Meireles, Fábio. Corpo-território: práticas artísticas e ativismo indígena. Mecila Working Paper, 2025.
Discusses Indigenous territory as a political, legal, ontological, and epistemic dispute.

Neurath, Johannes. “Cataloguing the Untranslatable.” Anthropology in Action, 2024.
Addresses language, orality, translation, and Wixárika worlds.

Long-term collaborative research with Lacandon Maya in Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico, 2020.
An example of community-based research involving cultural practices, ritual landscape, and community development.

Dollnick, Daniela. “Languages in Dreams: A Diary Study.” International Journal of Dream Research, 2024.
Shows links between waking language exposure and language presence in dreams.

“Tupinambá: The Territory Dreams.” Piseagrama.
Explores the relation between dream, self-government, and territory from a Tupinambá perspective.

D’Arcangelis, Carol Lynne; Quiroga, Lorna. “Cuerpo-Territorio: Towards Feminist Solidarities in the Americas.” Revista Eletrônica da ANPHLAC, 2023.
Connects body-territory, Indigenous feminisms, colonialism, and resistance to extractivism.

Zaragocin, Sofia. “Agua-cuerpo-territorio / Water-body-territory.” Political Geography, 2024.
Connects body, water, territory, and decolonial feminisms in the Americas.

Damasio, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon, 2021.
Basis for understanding consciousness as body, feeling, regulation, and lived world.

De Felice, Silvia et al. “Relational Neuroscience: Insights from Hyperscanning Research.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2025.
Supports cognition as relation among brains, bodies, and social context.

Grasso-Cladera, Aitana et al. “Embodied Hyperscanning for Studying Social Interaction.” Social Neuroscience, 2024.
Integrates EEG/fNIRS, body, physiology, and social interaction in studies of belonging and cooperation.