Living Experiences of Indigenous Health Practice: Belizean Maya communities and Belize Migrants

Authors

Kristina Baines, City University of New York (CUNY), Guttman

Abstract

Belize Maya communities, like many indigenous communities around the world, have long experienced challenges to maintaining health as they interface with an ever-expanding globalized model of development. This essay explores the relationship between traditional ecological practices and health in the context of a holistic understanding of what makes healthy bodies, healthy communities and healthy lives. Using the author’s Embodied Ecological Heritage (EEH) framework and a phenomenological lens, the essay shares how sensory experiences become embodied through everyday practice, promoting health and general wellbeing. This grounded theory, developed in and with Maya communities, helps us understand ways to consider and support health without identifying or isolating particular aspects of health. This holistic approach demonstrates how physical health is not simply connected to mental health and the social aspects of health but that all aspects of health are deeply integrated across individual bodies, communities and ever-changing ecologies.

Publication Date

12-19-2025

Author Bio(s)

Dr. Kristina Baines is Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Guttman Community College, and Affiliated Faculty at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. Dr. Baines is also Director of Anthropology at Cool Anthropology. Her research interests include Indigenous ecologies, health, and heritage, in 93 addition to publicly engaged research and dissemination practices. Kristina takes a phenomenological approach to understanding how the body remains and becomes well through engaging in traditional ecological practices in the context of global environmental and economic change. Most recently, she has worked with Maya and Garifuna communities in Belize, New York City and Los Angeles.

DOI

10.62915/2688-9188.1199

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.