ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how memetics, defined as the science of mapping intergenerational spatial and place-based knowledge systems, can be applied in relation to indigenous communities experiencing ongoing traumatic consequences of colonization and governmentalization of their lands, livelihoods, and ways of being. It places itself firmly within a non-reductionistic framework of extended-cognition thinking. Geography's impoverished engagement with neuroscience is damaging because, on the one hand, neuroscience needs geography in order to escape the trap of reductionism, especially as critiques from within the discipline push neuroscientists to begin thinking about extended cognition. The Leigh/Edelman model of neural clustering and selection is used as the basis for material structures for memes in the brain, towards establishing how memes, defined as units of cultural information, are performed on the ground. Names and their performance or storage in bodies and brains and external media such as maps become parts of NTNs that are, in turn, generative of place-naming practices.
