Latin America - What Questions Appear When We Change the Epistemological Territory?

Sometimes the problem is not that science has bad answers.

Perhaps the problem is that we continue asking the same questions from the same epistemological territory.

Much of modern psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science was built within European and North American contexts. Even today, developmental science still depends heavily on WEIRD populations — Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic — while Latin American societies remain underrepresented precisely in the construction of theories that are later described as universal.

But not every Body learns within the same territory.

Not every community organizes individuality, nature, belonging, work, spirituality, care, and authority in the same way.

So perhaps we need to ask:

how much of what we call universal belongs to the human organism, and how much belongs to the epistemological territory from which we learned to observe it?

Changing that territory does not mean abandoning evidence.

It means asking:

what evidence have we still not produced because certain questions never reached the laboratory?

We are also standardized by the questions we were never allowed to ask

At BrainLatam, we have repeatedly used a provocation:

we are also standardized by the choices we never had.

If only A and B appear before us, we may experience freedom by choosing between them.

But who decided that C would never appear?

Perhaps science has also been organized this way.

Colonization did not encounter an America without questions. It encountered peoples, technologies, languages, political organizations, and diverse relationships with water, forests, animals, collectives, and territory.

Many of those ways of asking did not participate on equal terms in the institutions that later determined what legitimate knowledge would be.

Decolonizing, therefore, does not need to mean replacing a European answer with a Latin American one.

It may mean something more fertile:

increasing the number of places from which a question can begin.

Decolonial community psychology from Abya Yala proposes precisely this shift: communities should move from being passive objects of interpretation to participants in the production of knowledge, asking not only what we know, but with whom knowledge is produced and for what purpose.

An Umbu point: when an object already contains other encounters

We can make this discussion less abstract.

Imagine entering the Archaeological Museum of Sambaqui of Joinville — MASJ and encountering material evidence related to the region's pre-colonial occupations.

MASJ defines itself as a space for memory, knowledge production, and dissemination, preserving pre-colonial archaeological, scientific, ethnographic, and technological collections.

Now imagine a lithic point associated with the Umbu tradition.

Materially, we encounter worked stone.

But do we encounter only stone?

Someone selected the raw material.

Held it.

Produced fractures.

Evaluated form, thickness, cutting edge, and possible use.

Another person may have observed the gesture.

Learned it.

Repeated it.

Modified it.

When another Body-Territory encounters this object thousands of years later, the encounter is already different.

An archaeologist may perceive technology.

A craftsperson may perceive the gesture of knapping.

A community may perceive ancestry.

A child may see only a pointed stone.

The material object remains recognizable.

The encounter does not.

This reminds us that data are not meaning.

The object preserves traces of earlier encounters, but it does not contain in full what was lived by those who produced it.

And what if what I encounter can also perceive me?

Here a decisive difference appears.

The Umbu point can transform the person who encounters it.

But it does not perceive our reaction and intentionally reorganize its next relationship with us.

Another subject can.

When I encounter another Body-Territory:

I perceive;

the other perceives;

I respond to their response;

they respond to mine;

and both of us change.

We move from:

subject → object → transformation

to:

Subject A ⇄ encounter ⇄ Subject B.

Afterward:

A₁ + B₁ → encounter → A₂ + B₂.

The next encounter already begins differently on both sides.

This opens a fundamental question:

are there ways of feeling that depend precisely on what I encounter also being capable of feeling and responding?

Trust, shame, belonging, rejection, and reciprocity suggest that the other is not merely a “social stimulus.”

The other participates in the configuration through which I perceive who I am at that moment.

An infant may perceive first without becoming a “leader”

A recent study by Goharbakhsh and Kulke offers a particularly interesting example.

Infants and caregivers participated together in a situation involving social inclusion, exclusion, and reinclusion. The experimental design allowed moments when it simply was “not the dyad's turn” to be compared with genuine social exclusion.

In infants, theta power was significantly higher during exclusion than during equivalent “not my turn” events. Caregivers did not show the same theta differentiation. In addition, interbrain synchrony did not simply increase globally during exclusion.

This does not allow us to say that the infant had “more consciousness” than the caregiver.

It allows a more careful statement:

in that event, the relational change acquired greater neurofunctional weight in the infant.

The caregiver participated in the same event without having to reproduce the same neural state.

Perhaps this asymmetry is precisely what makes regulation possible.

The infant changes.

The caregiver now encounters an infant who has changed.

The caregiver responds differently.

The infant then encounters a caregiver already modified by the infant's own reaction.

The dyad reorganizes without both brains needing to “enter the same wave.”

Perhaps this resembles a flocking synchronism more than literal synchrony of brain waves.

What if one participant's difference is information for the collective?

Here we can make a cautious analogy with ON/OFF systems.

In sensory circuits, relative differences among levels of activity help make contrast and change perceptible. No single element needs to contain the whole representation.

We are not saying that people are “ON or OFF neurons.”

The question is different:

what if, within a collective, one participant detects a difference before that difference acquires sufficient weight for the others?

In that case, desynchronization may not represent failure.

It may represent local sensitivity.

An individual positioned at a particular functional edge perceives first.

Their change alters what neighboring participants encounter.

Responses propagate.

The collective begins to change.

This is precisely why flocks and schools of fish provide interesting analogies.

In starling flocks, large-scale correlations can emerge across the group even though individuals respond within local dynamics. There is no need for a “commander of the flock” holding a complete representation of the collective movement.

Perhaps a human collective also does not need to perceive everything simultaneously.

Perhaps it needs to preserve difference long enough for what first appeared at one of its edges to circulate.

Jiwasa: functional position without ownership of power

This is where Jiwasa becomes especially powerful.

In the BrainLatam formulation:

belonging does not require remaining in the same position.

Today I may be the first to perceive a difference.

Tomorrow it may be you.

In one circumstance, my knowledge gains functional weight. In another, another Body-Territory occupies the position most sensitive to what is happening.

This profoundly changes the meaning of leadership.

The person who perceives first does not need to transform that position into a permanent right to command.

We may have:

difference → sensitive position → temporary function → collective reorganization

without necessarily producing:

function → office → permanent power → inheritance → dynasty.

Here we encounter an important critique of linear evolutionary narratives.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, challenges the idea that human societies necessarily evolved from simple groups toward increasingly rigid hierarchies. The authors emphasize historical and anthropological examples of societies that altered forms of authority according to season, context, and task. Specific cases and interpretations remain debated, but the critique of one inevitable evolutionary trajectory is important.

Perhaps one colonial inheritance is precisely the assumption that complexity requires permanent chiefs.

It may not.

Function can depend on position.

Power does not need to turn that position into property.

Synchronizing is not becoming the same

This also changes how we interpret hyperscanning.

A 2024 meta-analysis found positive associations between interbrain synchrony, teamwork processes, and performance. Synchrony is therefore an important variable. But these findings do not mean that maximum synchrony is always the best possible state.

The caregiver-infant study illustrates why caution matters.

Two organisms can participate in the same event, regulate one another, and still show different neural responses.

Perhaps adaptive collectives need to alternate:

synchrony ⇄ difference ⇄ reorganization ⇄ new synchrony.

Then the question is no longer only:

“how much did the group synchronize?”

It becomes:

“where did a relevant difference first appear, and how did it manage to circulate?”

Who perceived it?

Who responded?

Who acquired temporary functional weight?

How long did it take for centrality to shift again?

Perhaps one of the most important properties of an intelligent collective is precisely the mobility of centrality.

From recurrence to bubbles

And there is a possible consequence.

If certain Body-Territories repeatedly coexist, their responses become part of one another's environment.

One perceives threat.

Their expression changes.

Another encounters that expression.

Responds.

The response returns to the first.

Through repetition, some differences may gain weight while others lose it.

This is where we can formulate, as a BrainLatam hypothesis:

an identity bubble may begin before discursive identity itself — when relational recurrences start stabilizing which differences deserve attention, trust, fear, or belonging.

Not because everyone has the same brain.

But because they begin to share a landscape of relevance.

A bubble, then, would not merely be a collection of similar content.

It would be a relational territory that continuously changes the weight of differences perceived by its participants.

Who interprets what the collective felt?

And finally we arrive at the epistemological problem.

An algorithm identifies clusters.

A researcher identifies synchronies.

But the data do not explain their own meaning.

That is why BrainLatam proposes restitution:

data must return to those who produced them.

The Body-Territory should be able to understand, interpret, contest, and transform the representation produced about it.

Thus:

subject → data → researcher → interpretation

can become:

subject ⇄ data ⇄ interpretation ⇄ subject.

Not to replace evidence with opinion.

But to prevent the observed person from disappearing precisely when the production of meaning begins.

Perhaps this is what changing the epistemological territory allows us to ask.

Not only:

“what do we observe in them?”

But:

“what phenomena appear when difference, position, belonging, and interpretation remain mobile?”

Perhaps an intelligent collective is not one in which everyone follows the same center.

Perhaps it is one capable of continuously changing where the center is without turning a temporary functional position into a permanent right to command.

References

Fernández-Theoduloz, G. (2024). Research in Latin America from a decolonial perspective: Challenges of producing socially situated knowledge. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 34(2), 517–520.
Discusses the predominance of WEIRD populations and the need for socially situated Latin American knowledge production.

Ciófalo, N., & Ortiz-Torres, B. (2024). Toward decolonial community psychologies from Abya Yala. American Journal of Community Psychology, 74, 62–73.
Proposes community-based and pluriversal epistemologies from Abya Yala.

Goharbakhsh, N., & Kulke, L. (2026). Can You Feel My Pain? Neural-Behavioural Changes in Caregiver–Infant Dyads During Ostracism. Developmental Science, 29(5), e70269. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.70269
Shows greater infant theta power during exclusion compared with “not my turn,” without the same differentiation in caregivers and without a simple global increase in interbrain synchrony.

Cavagna, A., et al. (2010). Scale-free correlations in starling flocks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(26), 11865–11870. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1005766107
Demonstrates large-scale collective properties in flocks, useful here as a reference for complex systems and the propagation of perturbations.

Réveillé, C., Vergotte, G., Perrey, S., & Bosselut, G. (2024). Using interbrain synchrony to study teamwork: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 159, 105593.
Finds positive associations between interbrain synchrony and teamwork processes without establishing that maximal synchrony is universally optimal.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Challenges linear evolutionary narratives and highlights the historical variability of authority, hierarchy, and social organization.

Archaeological Museum of Sambaqui of Joinville — MASJ.
A space for memory, knowledge production, and dissemination that preserves pre-colonial archaeological, scientific, ethnographic, and technological collections.

BrainLatam (2026). Jiwasa — Belonging Without Remaining in the Same Position.
Develops belonging as compatible with positional mobility and temporary functional relevance.

BrainLatam (2026). The Data Must Return to Those Who Produced It.
Proposes returning data and inferences to the Body-Territory so that the subject can participate again in interpretation, contestation, and transformation.