Body-Territory - How Much of Who We Are Depends on Where We Were Able to Exist?

Imagine two children of the same age.

One grows up in an environment with regular nutrition, safety, frequent conversations, varied stimulation, and people available to answer questions.

The other grows up under conditions in which some of these experiences are simply unavailable.

The difference between them is not only what each child experienced.

It is also what each child had the opportunity to perceive, learn, remember, and imagine.

Perhaps we are shaped not only by the experiences we have had, but also by the experiences that never became possible for us.

It is from this question that we offer a Religare reading of the study by Larson et al. (2026) on the brain activity of young children in Bangladesh.

The Environment Has Already Arrived With the Child

In Brain Activity of Young Children in Bangladesh Is Associated With Biopsychosocial Conditions at the Individual-, Family-, and Household-Level, Larson and colleagues recorded EEG from children living in rural Bangladesh and investigated relationships between brain activity and different biological, family, and household conditions.

The researchers considered growth, nutrition, food security, psychosocial stimulation, maternal depression, and other factors.

They found associations between some of these conditions and different measures of resting-state brain activity.

The authors are appropriately cautious: the study primarily identifies associations, and several did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons.

Even so, the initiative is important.

It pushes us away from a simple image:

the brain on one side and the environment on the other.

When a child enters an EEG experiment, the environment has not remained outside the room.

That child has already spent months being nourished in a particular way, hearing particular voices, and living within particular levels of safety, stimulation, predictability, and care.

The environment has already arrived with the child.

Body-Territory

At BrainLatam, we use the concept of Body-Territory to think about precisely this continuity.

Larson et al. do not use this term. This is our theoretical interpretation.

Territory, here, does not refer only to geographical location.

It includes the material, affective, social, linguistic, cultural, and ecological conditions within which a body is able to exist.

This changes the question.

Instead of asking only:

“How is this brain developing?”

we can ask:

“Under which conditions is this Body-Territory being able to develop?”

This perspective finds important parallels in recent Latin American research.

In 2024, Joaquín Migeot, Carolina Panesso, Claudia Duran-Aniotz, Hernando Santamaría-García, Agustín Ibáñez, Sebastián Lipina, and colleagues proposed an allostatic perspective on health and development in Latin America. Their review emphasizes the importance of understanding inequality, violence, nutrition, pollution, environmental stress, and other factors together as conditions that can intersect with cognition, brain function, and multiple physiological systems.

Territory is not merely scenery.

It participates in the conditions under which development takes place.

We Are Also Shaped by What We Could Not Experience

But we can go one step further.

Much of science studies what a person has been exposed to.

Violence.

Pollution.

Language.

Stimulation.

Nutrition.

Yet there is another question:

What was never available?

If a child never encounters a particular word, experience, environment, relationship, or possibility, this does not simply mean that the child has “less information.”

It means that the repertoire available for interpreting the world may have been constructed through different paths.

We are not talking about deficiency.

Different cultures construct different repertoires.

The point is simpler:

experiences make some possibilities more available.

And experiences that never occurred may require longer paths before certain possibilities can later be imagined.

Argentine researcher Ana Clara Ventura, together with Diana Leyva, showed in a 2025 review of home learning environments in Latin America and the Caribbean that development depends not only on how many activities are available but also on the quality of interactions, cultural context, and the relationship between children and caregivers.

This allows us to propose:

possibility of experience → possibility of repertoire.

Territory Also Participates in the Future

This is where we begin to approach Religare.

In the model we propose:

Science is Doing.

Religion is Planning.

Politics is Choosing.

Planning means representing something that does not yet exist.

But where do the materials used to imagine the future come from?

Memories.

Language.

Images.

Stories.

People.

Experiences.

Fears.

Desires.

Everything that managed to become part of our repertoire.

Therefore, one of the hypotheses of Religare is:

territory participates not only in what we do today, but also in the futures we are able to represent tomorrow.

This does not mean that we are trapped by what we have experienced.

Human beings create, combine, invent, and transcend previous experiences.

But we do not begin from emptiness.

Our space of possibilities has a history.

Knowledge Is Also Relationship

Latin American anthropology and archaeology offer reflections that help deepen this idea.

Colombian anthropologist Astrid Ulloa and Ecuadorian geographer Sofía Zaragocin discuss bodies-territories, territorialities, nature, and non-human relationships as important dimensions for challenging rigid separations between bodies and spaces.

They are not proposing a neuroscientific theory.

But they raise a fundamental question:

What do we lose when we treat the body as independent from the relationships that constitute it?

Argentine archaeologist Alejandro Haber, through another path, questions the absolute separation between the knower and what is known.

In his work on Catamarcan gnosiology, Haber proposes understanding knowledge also as relationship.

This is particularly fertile for the concept of Body-Territory.

Because a territory does not only provide things to know.

It also participates in questions such as:

What deserves to be known?

Who can teach?

Which forms of knowledge receive value?

We Plan From Somewhere

The thought of Ailton Krenak adds another important layer.

In Futuro ancestral, published in 2022, Krenak challenges an idea of the future separated from the living world that makes that future possible.

Rivers, territory, ancestry, and future do not appear as independent dimensions.

Krenak is not proposing Religare.

But his reflection enters into dialogue with an essential question in our model:

From where do we plan?

Our answer would be:

we plan from within a Body-Territory.

There is no future imagined by nobody.

There is always someone, in a particular body, within a particular history, trying to represent what might still come to exist.

Not Everything That Exists Enters Our Space of Possibilities

We can now return to the children studied by Larson and colleagues.

EEG does not tell us who those children will become.

It does not reveal their future choices.

It does not measure their hopes.

But it does show something important:

aspects of children’s brain activity are already associated with concrete conditions in which those children are growing.

This allows us to ask a broader question.

When, as adults, we make a choice, perhaps we are not choosing among every possibility that theoretically exists.

We choose among the possibilities we are able to:

perceive;

remember;

represent;

imagine;

value.

Each of these capacities has a history.

And that history has a territory.

Body-Territory therefore means more than saying:

“the environment influences the brain.”

It means proposing that:

what we call the “self” emerges within a field of possibilities that was never entirely chosen by that same self.

We receive a language before choosing a language.

We receive narratives before deciding which narratives to accept.

We experience fear, affection, absence, opportunity, and limitation before we possess enough words to explain them.

Then we begin to Do.

We begin to Plan.

We begin to Choose.

And we call this our life.

Religare adds another question:

Which parts of this life became possible because our territory allowed us to encounter them — and which futures still appear impossible simply because we never had the opportunity to encounter them?

Recognizing this does not reduce autonomy.

It may expand it.

Because recognizing the limits of the space in which we learned to exist may be the first step toward exploring possibilities we did not yet know existed outside it.

Main Reference

Larson, L. M., Feuerriegel, D., Lall, G., Imrul Hasan, M., Braat, S., Jin, J., Biggs, B.-A., Bode, S., Pasricha, S.-R., Johnson, K. A., & Hamadani, J. D. (2026). Brain Activity of Young Children in Bangladesh Is Associated With Biopsychosocial Conditions at the Individual-, Family-, and Household-Level. Infancy, 31(4), e70108. DOI: 10.1111/infa.70108.

Complementary References

Haber, A. (2022). O conhecimento é o relacionamento: cenas de gnosiologia catamarcana. Revista de Arqueologia, 35(1), 39–52. DOI: 10.24885/sab.v35i1.957.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Migeot, J., Panesso, C., Duran-Aniotz, C., Ávila-Rincón, C., Ochoa, C., Huepe, D., Santamaría-García, H., Miranda, J. J., Escobar, M. J., Pina-Escudero, S., Ibáñez, A., Lipina, S., et al. (2024). Allostasis, health, and development in Latin America. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 162, 105697. DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105697.

Ulloa, A., & Zaragocin, S. (2022). Diàlegs sobre feminismes, ambientalismes i racismes des de les geografies feministes llatinoamericanes. Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 68(3), 481–491. DOI: 10.5565/rev/dag.743.

Ventura, A. C., & Leyva, D. (2025). Home learning environment in Latin America and the Caribbean: Associations with young children's cognitive and socioemotional development. Infant Behavior and Development, 80, 102126. DOI: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2025.102126.