Before the Word -  The Body Is Already Learning

How much of what we believe began before we knew how to explain it?

Perhaps we can begin without a definition.

Imagine a child watching someone prepare food. The child follows the hands, notices the pressure, the rhythm, the waiting. At some point, the child tries to do the same. Fails. Tries again. Adjusts the movement.

No one needed to explain everything.

Now imagine the same child in a different situation. An adult changes their tone of voice. The others become quiet. Someone steps away. The child may not yet know how to say "danger," "conflict," "respect," or "fear," but something has already begun to be perceived.

The body participates before there is a good sentence to describe what happened.

For a long time, we learn this way. By observing, following, imitating, repeating, differentiating. Some of these learnings will later receive names. Others may remain difficult to explain throughout our lives.

This brings us to the first question in this series:

How much of what we can explain today with words began when we still had no words to explain it?

Before investigating when words begin to trap us, we need to look at this earlier space - not necessarily earlier than language in a chronological sense, but earlier than explanation.

It is the moment when something is already happening within us, and we still do not know exactly what to say about it.

Yãy hã mĩy and the care not to translate too quickly

In the exhibition Indigenous Worlds, organized by UFMG with curatorship by members of the participating Indigenous peoples themselves, Sueli Maxakali and Isael Maxakali present yãy hã mĩy in connection with transformation, change, and the flow of time. An image can transform, a story can transform, and the person themselves can also transform.

We need to be careful here.

We are not saying that yãy hã mĩy simply means "imitation." Doing so would reproduce precisely the problem we want to examine throughout this series: finding a familiar word too quickly and allowing it to occupy the place of something much broader.

We can, however, allow the concept to provoke us.

What happens when we observe a transformation and, by participating in it, are also transformed?

Does a child learn only when someone explains what they are seeing?

Or does part of learning happen while the child looks, touches, follows, experiments, and reorganizes themselves in relation to what is taking place?

Perhaps we do not need to choose between body and word.

Perhaps we can notice that words arrive in a Body-Territory that was already in motion.

There are things we learn while doing them

In the same catalogue, Célia Xakriabá recalls a beautiful childhood experience. At school, children had to bring objects made from clay, using what they had learned from their families. She remembers shaping a small bird on the way and placing a bean in its eye. A few days later, the bean sprouted.

Later, experiences like this reappear in her elaboration of Body-Territory. The concept does not emerge as something simply received from the outside. It is woven together through stories, listening, relationships, ceramics, territory, and lived experience.

Perhaps we can recognize something similar in our own lives.

There are things we know how to do but struggle to teach.

There are situations in which we perceive that "something has changed" but do not yet know what.

There are people our bodies seem to approach or move away from before we construct an explanation.

There are songs that alter our state before we can speak about them.

There are movements we understand only after becoming capable of performing them.

This does not mean that the body possesses some secret form of truth.

It simply means that learning and experience do not always depend on prior verbal formulation.

Recent Brazilian research on Indigenous childhoods also questions the idea of a universal form of childhood separated from community life. Leiliane Domingues da Silva and Dagmar de Mello e Silva discuss forms of learning connected to participation, relationships, and culturally diverse ways of living childhood.

Perhaps, then, we can replace a familiar sequence:

someone explains -> I understand -> then I do

with something more open:

I encounter -> observe -> participate -> try -> perceive differences -> begin to learn -> and perhaps later I can explain.

A Body-Territory does not learn alone

We also need to abandon the image of an isolated body receiving information.

We learn with someone.

We learn somewhere.

We learn under particular conditions.

We learn while other bodies respond to what we do.

Braulina Aurora, in her research on Indigenous women and Body-Territory in movement, developed at the University of Brasília, brings body, territory, experience, memory, and knowledge production into close relation.

Ailton Krenak, in Ancestral Future, published in 2022, also invites us to move away from imagining the human being as an individual separated from the world and toward relationships continually shaped by the Earth, rivers, and ancestry.

We do not need to merge these perspectives as though they were saying exactly the same thing.

We can simply allow them to broaden our question:

Where does what I learned end, and where does the environment in which I learned begin?

Perhaps that boundary is less clear than we usually imagine.

Archaeology also encounters learning without sentences

Latin American archaeology offers another perspective.

When Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves reconstructs thousands of years of Indigenous history in Central Amazonia, we find populations transforming landscapes, managing plants, producing anthropogenic soils, and building ways of living long before these experiences reached us as books or written treatises. His 2022 work Sob os Tempos do Equinócio brings together part of this long history.

Archaeology cannot tell us exactly what a person felt thousands of years ago.

But it can show that knowledge also leaves traces in doing.

A technique can remain in a ceramic object.

A choice can transform a landscape.

A sequence of practices can cross generations.

Not every form of knowledge needs to reach the future as a sentence.

This may help us notice something that seems simple but changes our perspective considerably:

human knowledge does not live only in the words that survived.

And the brain? What can we actually observe?

Neuroscience can enter here, but we should resist asking it to "prove" everything we have discussed.

In 2022, Dashtestani and colleagues simultaneously used EEG and fNIRS to investigate people observing live actions and performing actions themselves.

EEG follows changes in cerebral electrical activity with very high temporal resolution. fNIRS follows cortical hemodynamic changes associated with neural activity.

By combining the two techniques, the researchers found partially shared components between networks involved in action observation and action execution, including parietal participation.

This does not prove that observing is the same as learning.

It does not prove yãy hã mĩy.

It does not prove Body-Territory.

And it does not demonstrate that every act of imitation produces knowledge.

But it does allow us to notice something interesting:

before someone needs to formulate an explanation about an observed movement, the brain is already participating in that observation in an organized and measurable way.

Experience does not wait for the sentence to arrive.

But what we learn before words can also trap us

This is where our reflection becomes less comfortable.

Learning bodily does not mean learning the truth.

We can learn a useful gesture.

We can learn care.

We can learn the rhythm of a task.

But we can also learn fear.

We can learn to move away when a particular kind of person appears.

We can learn that something "is not for people like us."

We can learn shame by watching how others react.

We can learn an association that made sense at one point and no longer does.

Danilo Silva Guimarães, discussing Indigenous Psychology in 2022, calls attention precisely to the risk of taking categories constructed within particular cultural systems and treating them as universal descriptions of human experience.

That observation will matter throughout this series.

The body can learn.

The body can feel.

The feeling can be intense.

And we still need to ask what it means.

Feeling is not the same as verifying a truth.

When words arrive

At some point, a word encounters what was already happening.

"Fear."

"Love."

"Family."

"Danger."

"God."

"Shame."

"Mine."

"Theirs."

The word can be an extraordinary tool.

It allows us to share an experience, ask for help, teach, remember, imagine, and combine what we have lived with what other people have lived.

But perhaps we should preserve a small opening.

The word arrived after many things had already happened.

It is not necessarily the experience itself.

It is one possible way of relating to the experience.

And perhaps we can end this first encounter right there, before moving forward.

Without abandoning words.

Without distrusting the body.

Without needing to decide which one possesses the truth.

Simply remaining for a moment with the question:

How much of what we believe today began in experiences for which we did not yet have words?

And when we finally learned to name those experiences...

what happened when we began to confuse the name we found with what we had actually lived?

That is where the next blog begins.

Main references

AURORA, Braulina. Indígenas mulheres: corpo território em movimento. University of Brasília, dissertation defended in 2022.

DASHTESTANI, H. et al. Structured sparse multiset canonical correlation analysis of simultaneous fNIRS and EEG provides new insights into the human action-observation network. Scientific Reports, 2022.

GUIMARÃES, Danilo Silva. A Tarefa Histórica da Psicologia Indígena diante dos 60 anos da Regulamentação da Psicologia no Brasil. Psicologia: Ciência e Profissão, 2022.

KRENAK, Ailton. Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras, 2022.

NEVES, Eduardo Góes. Sob os Tempos do Equinócio: oito mil anos de história da Amazônia Central. 2022.

SILVA, Leiliane Domingues da; SILVA, Dagmar de Mello e. O que pode a educação das crianças indígenas ensinar para as escolas voltadas para a educação das infâncias? Inter-Ação, 2022.

Mundos Indígenas. Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG, 2020. Although published before 2021, it is maintained here as a primary source for the Indigenous curatorial presentation of yãy hã mĩy and Body-Territory.