EDCMA

Description

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous Maya and Garifuna communities in Belize, New York City and Los Angeles, this paper forefronts the therapeutics of sensory experience in traditional healing modalities and conceptions of the well body. Exploring the sensory aspects of daily ecological interactions, including the use of medicinal plants, and asking in which ways community heritage practices become constitutive of a healing practices, it engages the author’s embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework to ask how we might understand wellness in this context. Bringing together conversations on definitions of placebo and the anthropology of the body with current ethnographic work around relationships between historical trauma, indigenous land rights and natural resource management, and indigenous identity-making and caring, the discussion makes a case for a sensory ecology of therapeutics as part of healing practice among indigenous communities undergoing complex dimensions of global change.
 
Speaker biography: Kristina Baines is a sociocultural anthropologist with an applied medical/environmental focus. Her research interests include indigenous ecologies, health, and heritage in the context of global change, in addition to publicly engaged research and dissemination practices. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, Guttman Community College, affiliated faculty at CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, and the founder and director of anthropology at Cool Anthropology.
 
The talk will be followed by Q&A and informal discussions, with a light lunch provided.