Arequipa as a Pre-Linguistic Thermometer of Social Collapse
Arequipa as a Pre-Linguistic Thermometer of Social Collapse - When violence appears before words
Arequipa should not be read as an isolated case. It can be understood as a living thermometer of something deeper: when suicide and femicide rise, it suggests that the social territory has lost the ability to regulate belonging at levels that precede discourse. Before ideologies, laws, or narratives, there is a body trying to remain coherent. When it cannot, forms of trapped anergy emerge — energy that finds no outlet and begins to accumulate in silence.
The starting point here is not opinion, but the body. From a Damasian perspective, consciousness does not begin with ideas but with bodily positioning in relation to what is perceived. The organism is always pre-activated. When it lives too long under threat or vigilance, it loses the spontaneous path back to fruitional awareness and metacognition (Zone 2). Functionality may remain, but at a growing internal cost. In hostile and repetitive environments, this cost can crystallize into rigid states and narrative capture (Zone 3), where interoception and proprioception no longer guide life.
At this point, an often invisible cultural dimension must be brought to the center: the Quechua language is still spoken in the Arequipa region. This is not an ethnographic detail — it is an active neurocultural factor. Language is not merely symbolic communication; it is a bodily architecture. Each language reorganizes breathing, rhythm, imagery, and modes of belonging.
Quechua can function as a true cultural interoceptive regulator. Unlike languages historically shaped by more abstract colonial matrices, Quechua emerges from cosmologies in which body, territory, and community are continuous. It does not merely describe the world — it re-embeds the speaker within it. Speaking Quechua mobilizes gestures, pauses, tonalities, and images that often reduce dissociation between experience and expression.
This has profound implications. When intense experiences lack a language compatible with the body, they do not disappear — they remain as implicit load. In Damasian terms, they persist as non-symbolized bodily states. What we are proposing here is that some forms of social anergy persist not because of lack of discourse, but because of lack of language that can touch the body from within.
In this sense, Quechua may function as a cultural release valve for interoceptive regulation. It allows experiences that would remain encapsulated within more normative linguistic frameworks to find embodied symbolic expression. When expression is restricted to languages inherited from colonial administrative structures — such as formal Spanish — experience may be cognitively translated but not metabolized at the bodily level.
This becomes particularly relevant when considering trapped feminine anergies. This is not about psychologizing violence nor shifting responsibility onto individuals. It is about recognizing a mechanism: bodies that have learned to inhibit response, territories that reduce safe outlets, and cultures that reinforce surveillance and comparison. When cultural expression narrows, energy does not vanish — it transforms.
The alternation between Quechua and Spanish, therefore, is not merely bilingualism. It is bi-state embodiment. Each language can activate distinct interoceptive and belonging-related configurations. In contexts where Quechua is silenced or devalued, a deep regulatory layer may be lost — something rarely visible in linguistic statistics but potentially present in markers of social distress.
Here, the concept of Yãy hã mĩy (Maxakali origin) helps illuminate a contemporary deviation. Imitation has always been a path to transcendence — learning movements that expand being. But in highly normative environments, imitation shifts from expansion to adaptation. Instead of releasing vitality, imitation becomes a tool for social fitting. The movement no longer completes. And when movement does not complete, consciousness shortens.
This is where extended APUS and TEKOHA become relevant. Extended APUS refers to the embodied ground of belonging — not only geographical but existential. Extended TEKOHA refers to the social territory that sustains life without symbolic humiliation. When both weaken — and when languages that sustain deep belonging recede — the collective body shifts into survival mode.
What begins to emerge in places like Arequipa is an invitation to reframe how we read social crises. We may not be facing only economic, moral, or political breakdowns, but collective interoceptive dysregulation. At this level, living culture is not ornament — it is invisible infrastructure for social health.
This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: are we trying to solve bodily suffering with purely discursive tools? Perhaps part of the answer lies in recognizing that belonging cannot be decreed — it must be regulated. And such regulation passes through territory, embodied culture, and languages that still have the capacity to reach the body from within.
In the next texts, this path deepens: first by bridging spirituality and neuroscience through a shared language (Utupe and Pei Utupe), and then by exploring how politics and technology compete for something even more fundamental than ideas — the regulation of human belonging itself.
References (Post-2021)
Interoception & Neuroscience
Khalsa, S. S., et al. (2022). Interoception and mental health: a roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
Chen, W. G., et al. (2021). The emerging science of interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Berntson, G. G., & Khalsa, S. S. (2021). Neural circuits of interoception. Trends in Neurosciences.
Cultural Neuroscience & Embodiment
Kirmayer, L. J., et al. (2022). Cultural neuroscience and global mental health. Nature Human Behaviour.
De Leersnyder, J., & Mesquita, B. (2023). Cultural regulation of emotion. Annual Review of Psychology.
Indigenous Language & Embodied Identity (Latin American researchers)
Hornberger, N. H., & Coronel-Molina, S. (2023). Quechua language vitality and embodied identity. International Journal of the Sociology of Language.
García, M. E., & Chávez, L. (2022). Indigenous language use and emotional well-being in the Andes. Latin American Research Review.
