Body–Territory Before Colonization
Body–Territory Before Colonization
Subtitle: Psychopathology of the Brazilian State
1. Opening — Fractal, 17 years old
Before “property,” there was ground.
Before “borders,” there were paths.
Before “the State,” there was a body sensing the land.
Wind, mountain, river, soil, fire, sky.
None of this was a “resource.”
It was a living world.
The body was not separate from the land.
The body was territory.
Maybe colonization began right there—
when someone looked at a living territory
and called it a thing.
2. Deepening
Colonization did not only take land.
It took ways of feeling.
Long before European arrival, the Americas held complex, diverse societies grounded in relationship with territory.
Caral–Supe (present-day Peru) developed large urban centers over 5,000 years ago, with evidence of social coordination, ecological adaptation, and resilience—without the simplified narrative of collapse through violence.
In Mesoamerica, the Olmec horizon shaped early cultural systems—art, spatial organization, cosmology, and governance. Recent studies suggest mixed governance models, combining collective and hierarchical features rather than a single rigid structure.
Across the Andes, Inca and pre-Inca societies organized life through ayllu (kin-based community), reciprocity, vertical ecological circulation, and sacred relations with mountains, water, and land.
Territory was not background.
It was relational structure.
In the south of South America, traditions associated with the Umbu complex show deep-time human presence, mobility, ecological knowledge, and adaptive strategies across varied landscapes.
And in Mesoamerican regions like present-day Guatemala, Maya societies developed complex systems integrating astronomy, agriculture, ritual, and territorial orientation.
This reveals something essential:
there was no single Indigenous model.
There were many worlds.
Olmec, Caral–Supe, Inca, Andean, Maya/Guatemalan, and Southern traditions all show:
human societies can organize themselves through belonging to territory,
not only through property, control, and accumulation.
Colonization fractured this.
It transformed:
territory → land
land → commodity
body → labor
spirituality → obedience
difference → inferiority
This is the original trauma of the colonial State.
When the modern State emerges without body–territory, it is already amputated.
It manages people as numbers.
Rivers as resources.
Forests as stock.
Peoples as problems.
Here, APUS becomes central.
APUS is not only a mountain.
It is extended proprioception.
It is when the body senses that its balance depends on the surrounding territory.
If the river dies, something in the body dies.
If the mountain is wounded, memory is wounded.
If the forest burns, the “we” loses breath.
Colonization tried to sever this connection.
But it did not disappear.
It remains in Indigenous peoples, quilombos, riverine communities, small farmers, and in anyone who still senses that life cannot be reduced to production and consumption.
Body–territory reminds us:
human life did not begin in the market.
It began in belonging.
3. Metacognition
Now bring this into your body.
Where do you feel that you belong?
Not as an address.
As a sensation.
Is there a place where your breathing changes?
A street, a tree, a coastline, a mountain, a smell of rain?
That is body–territory.
Now ask:
Does the modern world bring you closer to this?
Or pull you away from it?
When your day is filled with screens, traffic, speed, and consumption—
does your body still feel territory?
Or only task?
Colonization continues when we lose the ability to feel where we live.
When the body no longer senses territory, it accepts any environment.
It accepts malls as plazas.
Feeds as community.
Consumption as belonging.
But when the body reconnects with the living world, something shifts.
We begin to see that politics is not only elections.
Politics is water.
Land.
Air.
Food.
Time.
Body.
Without body–territory, the State becomes a machine.
With body–territory, the State can become care again.
And that may be where a living future begins.
References (Didactic Order)
Books
Ailton Krenak — Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
Argues that territory is not a resource, but a living relationship involving memory, body, and future.Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert — The Falling Sky
Presents a profound critique of extractive society and describes the forest as a spiritual, political, and embodied world.Eduardo Viveiros de Castro — The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul
Explores Amerindian cosmologies beyond Western categories of nature and society.Marisol de la Cadena — Earth Beings
Shows how Andean worlds include mountains and territory as active political and relational beings.David Graeber & David Wengrow — The Dawn of Everything
Reinforces that human societies have always been diverse, not necessarily organized through domination.Rutger Bregman — Humankind: A Hopeful History
Supports the idea that cooperation and belonging are real human tendencies.
Post-2021 Publications and Studies
Stark (2022) — Mixed Governance in Mesoamerican Societies
Shows that early societies linked to the Olmec horizon combined collective and hierarchical principles.Science Advances (2023) — Origins of Mesoamerican Spatial and Astronomical Systems
Demonstrates sophisticated territorial organization using lidar and large-scale archaeological mapping.Fossile et al. (2023) — Archaeology and Marine Adaptation in the Neotropics
Links ancient human activity to ecological knowledge and sustainable interaction with environments, including southern traditions.Ríos-Vizcarra (2025) — Andean Domestic Space and Symbolic Territory
Shows how homes in Andean societies embody ancestral and territorial meaning.Lourdeau et al. (2025) — Early Human Occupation in Southern South America
Presents evidence of long-term settlement and adaptation in regions associated with Umbu traditions.Scaffidi (2026) — Andean Kinship and Territorial Relationality
Explores ayllu, reciprocity, and relational identity as territorial social organization systems.
