The Dismembered APUS: when land becomes paper

When did the mountain stop being a mountain and become a document?

This question reveals a decisive transformation in human history: the passage from lived territory to fragmented, registered, traded, and rule-governed territory. This is what we call the dismembered APUS.

In the APUS framework, the body does not end at the skin. It extends into territory—water, land, home, street, forest, and relationships. The body senses the world as continuity. This continuity organizes perception, memory, belonging, and action. Over time—especially with colonization and the rise of modern capitalism—this continuity was broken.

Territory, once experienced as a space of life, was cut into parts. Those parts received names: property, title, deed, contract, debt, collateral, asset, fund. Each piece of land came to be represented by paper—and, more recently, by digital code.

This process was not neutral. It reorganized the very experience of the body.

When a mountain becomes property, it is no longer only a reference of stability for the body. When a river becomes a concession, it is no longer only a flow of life. When a forest becomes a resource, it is no longer only expanded breathing. Territory ceases to be continuity and becomes fragment.

    APUS was not merely divided.
It was dismembered into papers.

This fragmentation produces a deep rupture. The body remains alive, but it loses the sense of the whole. It begins to orient itself through disconnected parts: home separated from land, work separated from life, money separated from care, individual separated from collective.

This rupture is not only symbolic or economic. It is also neurobiological.

Bodily orientation depends on continuity. When continuity is broken, the nervous system shifts into defense. Perception narrows, attention locks onto threats, breathing becomes shallow, and trust decreases. The body moves into survival mode—what we describe as Zone 3.

In this state, the body no longer feels territory as extension. The world is experienced as risk. The collective becomes competition. The other is no longer part of “we,” but a potential threat.

Fragmentation also reorganizes power.

When territory was lived as continuity, power was distributed across relationships, cycles, and communal practices. With fragmentation, power concentrates in those who control the papers—those who define who can own, buy, sell, owe, or charge.

    Whoever controls the rules of representation controls the territory—
even without setting foot on it.

This is a crucial shift. Territory is no longer governed by presence; it is governed by representation.

Rogério Haesbaert describes how modern territoriality becomes increasingly tied to juridical-political and economic logics, often detached from body and life, while Latin American perspectives seek to restore territory as lived, relational, and existential.

Similarly, Arturo Escobar argues that territory is not merely an administered space but an ontology—a way of being. When territory is reduced to property, we are not only changing economic organization; we are altering existence itself.

This dynamic intensifies with financialization.

Papers begin to represent other papers. Titles become assets. Assets become derivatives. Derivatives become speculative instruments. The physical territory dissolves into layers of abstraction.

Today, many who control vast territories have never been there. Control operates through contracts, algorithms, and digital flows.

    Land becomes data.
    Territory becomes code.
    APUS becomes abstraction.

Contemporary neuroscience has not fully incorporated this dimension, but it points in the same direction. Studies using EEG, fNIRS, and hyperscanning show that the brain organizes differently in contexts of cooperation, trust, and bonding versus competition, threat, and isolation.

Relational neuroscience demonstrates that inter-brain coupling increases with cooperation and shared goals, while stress and threat contexts reduce synchrony and increase defensive responses (De Felice et al., 2025). Embodied hyperscanning research further shows that social interaction involves coordinated brain and bodily processes—breathing, heart rate variability, posture—not just isolated neural activity (Grasso-Cladera et al., 2024).

Yet scientific language still tends to describe these findings in fragmented terms:

• neural synchrony

• inter-brain coupling

• social coordination

    It measures the effects, but does not name the cause.

From the APUS perspective, the connection becomes clear: fragmented territory produces fragmented bodies. The loss of continuity pushes the nervous system toward defense. The loss of collective grounding pushes society toward competition.

This helps explain why money becomes central.

When territory is no longer felt as continuity, belonging must be replaced. Money promises security, access, and control. But as an abstraction, it cannot provide real belonging.

A person may accumulate wealth and still feel groundless.

Because belonging is not an economic variable.
It is a bodily condition.

The metaphor of the cardboard illustrates this well.

Imagine a community that cuts a large piece of cardboard into smaller pieces to facilitate exchange. Each piece represents value, but remains linked to real life: food, work, care, education, health. Over time, those who control the production of the cardboard and the rules of its circulation begin to control the community itself.

Now imagine that these pieces stop representing life directly and begin to represent other pieces—and then other abstractions, and finally digital codes.

   The distance between life and value expands.

This is the dismembered APUS.

Territory ceases to be lived as body and becomes operated as a system of representations. In the process, the body loses its capacity to feel the whole.

But this condition is not irreversible.

Recognizing the dismembered APUS is the first step toward reconstructing belonging. The goal is not to deny property, contracts, or economic systems, but to re-anchor territory as the basis of life rather than merely an asset.

In this sense, politics must be rethought.

If the body extends into territory, then organizing territory is also organizing mental health, collective intelligence, and the capacity to live together. Education, health, safety, housing, access to land, water, and common spaces are not separate issues—they are conditions for restoring APUS.

This directly connects with proposals such as DREX Cidadão, where money is reintroduced as a basic metabolic function of the territory, generated at the level of the citizen rather than exclusively within financial systems.

The aim is not to eliminate money, but to reconnect it to life.

In the end, the dismembered APUS reveals something fundamental:

it is not only land that was fragmented.
It is our capacity to feel the whole.

The body became function.
Territory became paper.
The collective became threat.
Money became abstract rule.

And when this happens, life ceases to be belonging and becomes dispute.

The challenge of our time is not only economic reorganization, but the restoration of the body’s ability to feel territory as continuity.

Because as long as territory remains paper,
the body will remain lost.

References

HAESBAERT, Rogério. “From Body-Territory to Territory-Body (of the Earth): Decolonial Contributions.” GEOgraphia, 2020.
Key reference for understanding territory as lived, relational, and embodied in Latin American thought.

ESCOBAR, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Duke University Press, 2021.
Develops the idea of territory as ontology and critiques its reduction to economic and state logics.

SVAMPA, Maristella. Neo-Extractivism in Latin America. Cambridge University Press, 2019 (ongoing debates post-2021).
Analyzes extractivism and the fragmentation of territory under contemporary capitalism.

DE FELICE, Silvia et al. “Relational Neuroscience: Insights from Hyperscanning Research.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2025.
Explores inter-brain coupling, cooperation, and social interaction as relational processes.

GRASSO-CLADERA, Aitana et al. “Embodied Hyperscanning for Studying Social Interaction.” Social Neuroscience, 2024.
Shows the importance of integrating brain and body measurements in social neuroscience.

BOELENS, Rutgerd et al. “Hydrosocial Territories: A Political Ecology Perspective.”
Provides a framework for understanding territory as a site of power relations and conflict, especially around water.

CRUZ HERNÁNDEZ, Delmy Tania. “Body-Territory and Community Feminisms.”
Connects violence against land with violence against bodies, reinforcing territory as a space of life.