Heritage in the Body

Joining Kristina Baines as she travels between communities in Belize and then to Belizean gatherings in the U.S. and beyond is delightful and allows the reader to understand how Maya and Garifuna people aim to live well through maintaining their cultural heritage in today's troubled and global world. The experiences of the Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous individuals and communities she engages with come alive in these pages. The reader comes away from the book optimistic about how people can generate well-being through sharing their cultural practices and history.'—Melissa Johnson, author of Becoming Creole

‘Kristina Baines adeptly weaves together storytelling and theoretical considerations in her ethnographic account of life among Belizean Maya and Garifuna communities. EEH, embodied ecological heritage, provides an easy-to-grasp framework for ethnography of everyday practices and techniques that maintain, generate or restore well-being, as it cuts across entrenched dichotomies of the traditional and modern, the indigenous and Western, the self and the other.’—Elisabeth Hsu, author of Chinese Medicine in East Africa, An Intimacy with Strangers

‘This innovative text by Kristina Baines skillfully illuminates the role that traditional cultural practices play in maintaining the health and well-being of Indigenous peoples in the contexts of modernization, immigration, racism and discrimination, and climate change. Baines argues that rather than being a burden to overcome, embodied ecological heritage is an asset to promote and maintain health and well-being in the Anthropocene. In doing so, the text makes a compelling argument for the importance of maintaining traditional cultural and heritage practices in a world of increasingly tumultuous change and violent disruption.’—James Stinson, York University