The University of Arizona Press

December 5, 2024

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body: Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change, by Kristina Baines, examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Baines tells the intimate stories of how Indigenous Maya and Garifuna Belizeans—both in Belize and in the United States—navigate macro-level processes such as economic development, climate change, political shifts, and global health crises in the context of changes in their own lives.

Employing an embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, Baines explores the links between health and heritage as a fluid series of ecological practices. Health and wellness are holistically defined and approached from a phenomenological perspective. Baines focuses on how sensory experiences change the body through practice and provides insights into community-driven alternatives as a means to maintain and support happy, healthy lives. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

“CHANGE IS GONNA COME”

Accepting the inevitability of change can be seen as equal parts ambivalence and pragmatism. Whether people like it or not, change happens, and they must prepare for the inevitable and roll with the punches. People negotiate changes in subtle ways, both preempting and responding to the changing conditions of their lives. It is this perspective that guided the decision-making of many of the Maya community members I have worked with, exemplified by the quote in the opening vignette about how the road was both good and bad and the next part of the assessment from the person who said it, a former alcalde: “Well, it’s coming.” There is an element of inevitability or personal powerlessness when it comes to individual experience of large-scale changes. That said, however, Belizean communities have been unusually successful in many ways when it comes to accepting seemingly inevitable development changes: notable examples include the public burning of genetically modified corn seed to avoid its introduction into the country and the failure of international fast-food chains to open successful branches in Belize.

In the popular narrative, the effects of change on Indigenous communities can be oversimplified to evoke pictures of a cultural and physical genocide. There are certain truths to reckon with in this assessment; however, while the negative effects of climate change and global development processes on Indigenous and other marginalized groups are well-documented, so too are examples of resilience and adaptive practices among the communities impacted by these changes. It is my hope that this book will go some distance in illuminating this resilience without minimizing the real challenges these communities face, both in their histories and in their everyday lives. Change need not necessarily be embraced or feared; it simply is a part of life, with moments of increased dimensions and intensities. Perhaps this moment, the “Anthropocene,” as it has been termed in recent years, is one of these times of intensification.

EMBODIED ECOLOGICAL HERITAGE

The effect of changes on individuals, of course, is more than a series of clichés, whatever truth they may contain. As I asked people about their health, I noted that answers increasingly included how changes across multiple dimensions—spatial, temporal, ecological—had manifested in individual bodies. People had moved for work, gone to college, changed their farming practices, and stopped drinking herbal medicines—for example—and they felt the impact of these changes in their bodies. With my ongoing ethnographic work guided by the embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, I have sought to capture how Indigenous Belizeans have navigated these ever-present environmental and economic changes throughout their lived experience. Embodied ecological heritage kept my focus on the role of heritage, traditional ecological practices, and, more specifically, on how the individuals and communities I studied maintained healthy lives. People spoke about the maintenance and loss of “traditions” and of what it meant to be Maya or to be Garifuna in the context of changing practices. While heritage should not be conceptualized as a static concept, it brings with it a sense of continuity, in which the past informs individual and group identity, which was helpful to community members in the context of change.

I developed the EEH framework in 2011 during my first long research period, living in Santa Cruz, a small, primarily Mopan Maya village in southern Belize. The way that community members spoke about and conceptualized their health was intimately connected to how they spoke about “being Maya” or about participating in traditional ecological practices. The relationship between health and what the Maya community members defined as heritage practices existed on many levels and incorporated ideas about food, work, and education. The connections were simultaneously physical, mental, and social, with the healthy body described as that which could work and grow and prepare food in the traditional way. Their lived experience could be understood as EEH. This lens is useful describing health, particularly in communities that are not fully steeped in the legacy of Cartesian dualism. It is complementary to more politicized, critical health perspectives, which highlight structural forces and impacts on health. Embodied ecological heritage is an important intervention in this perspective in that it allows individual sensory experience to be understood in the context of both the physical and the social, which is an aspect of health understanding that receives little attention. Bodies change through everyday practices, and these changes matter for health. Embodied ecological heritage guides the understanding and explanation of these changes, illuminating the role of heritage practices in the maintenance of health.

Embodied ecological heritage brings together seemingly disparate theories about the ways in which anthropologists have historically understood bodies and bodily practice. Phenomenology seeks to capture “being in the world”—the lived and embodied experience, felt through action or practice. This perspective has been set in contrast with more cognitive theoretical orientations, which aim to capture the internal structures of the mind and how they classify external factors they encounter. In my work, and through the development of EEH, I argue that these orientations need not be in opposition. Through a focus on how sensory experiences change the body (including the brain), EEH reveals how phenomenological and cognitive perspectives can coexist. Cognitive phenomenology as a theoretical orientation shows heritage is not static, not a list of traditional plants or foods, not simply knowledge stored in the brain; rather, it is something that is carried in the body. Embodied ecological heritage is a grounded theory: people speak about their heritage in terms of practice, or what they do with their bodies, and how those practices relate to how they feel. The language of sensory experiences—the smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings of doing and being in the world—is rich with connections to tradition, to heritage identity, to health. Documenting and understanding how these connections happen and how they form a critical way of not only being well in, but also in thinking about, the world is vital.