Kristina Baines – Socio-Cultural Anthropologist

My research focuses of the relationship between heritage and health among indigenous and immigrant communities. I take 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, I have worked with Maya and Garifuna communities in Belize, New York City and Los Angeles.

I am a Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York (CUNY), Guttman Community College, Affiliated Faculty at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, Department of Community Health and Social Sciences and Director of Anthropology at Cool Anthropology.

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Selected Publications

Heritage in the Body: Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change (2024)

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Kristina 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.

“Joining Kristina Baines as she travels between communities in Belize and then to Belizean gatherings in the United States 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, Southwestern University

“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, Oxford University

Cool Anthropology: How to Engage the Public with Academic Research (2022)

Through a series of case studies by leading anthropologists, Cool Anthropology highlights the many different approaches that scholars have used to engage the public with their research. Editors Kristina Baines and Victoria Costa showcase efforts to make meaningful connections with communities outside the walls of academia, moving anthropological thinking beyond the discipline. Through their focus on collaborative efforts, contributors push against the exclusivity of “knowledge production” to ask how engaging communities as both producers and consumers of academic research helps to promote anthropology better and do anthropology better.

“Envisioned as a community, a movement, a website, and now an edited volume, Cool Anthropology demonstrates the value of engaging broad audiences with powerful insights offered by anthropology. The book details a rich array of new and innovative approaches to disseminating knowledge, providing readers a how-to on public anthropology, a sense of camaraderie, and affirmation that such efforts are not only acceptable but imperative.”

Alisse Waterston, City University of New York, John Jay

“Cool Anthropology is a pioneering attempt for anthropologists to reach out to broad audiences beyond the classroom by availing themselves of contemporary technologies not previously used as tools to connect with the public. The book is a critical step forward at a time when the discipline is needed to counter a world full of disinformation and misinformation.”

Laura Nader, University of California, Berkeley

Embodying Ecological Heritage in a Maya Community: Health, Happiness, and Identity (2016)

This book provides an ethnographic account of life in a rural farming village in southern Belize, focusing on the connections between traditional ecological practices and the health and wellness of the Maya community living there. It discusses how complex histories, ecologies, and development practices are negotiated by individuals of all ages, and the community at large, detailing how they interact with their changing environments. The study has wide applicability for indigenous communities fighting for rights to manage their lands across the globe, as well as for considering how health is connected to heritage practices in communities worldwide.

“In this highly original ethnography of the Mopan Maya, Baines shows us how the health of the body is deeply and strongly connected to the health of the environment. This book is a solid bridge between the traditions of ecological anthropology, and the anthropology of the senses and the encultured body. The writing is fluid and evocative, rich in ethnographic details of daily life.”

Richard Wilk, Indiana University

Baines, Kristina. 2022. “It’s normal to admit you’re not okay”: New York City college students’ shaping mental health through journaling. Social Science and Medicine — Mental Health. Vol 2

Health/Wellness, Embodied Ecological Heritage

Baines, Kristina. 2018. “But Are They Actually Healthier?”: Challenging the health/wellness divide through the ethnography of embodied ecological heritage. Medicine Anthropology Theory. 5:5 5-29

Narrating Practice with Children and Adolescents

Baines, Kristina. 2019. “In Between Worlds: Narrating Ecological Heritage Practices for Teenage Wellness” In Narrating Perspectives in Childhood and Adolescence. Mery Diaz and Benjamin Shepard eds. Columbia University Press. Pp.102-117

Baines, Kristina. 2016. The Environmental Heritage and Wellness Assessment: Applying quantitative techniques to traditional ecological knowledge and wellness relationships. Journal of Ecological Anthropology. Vol.18

Community/Public/Applied

The public dissemination of anthropological ideas is central to my mission as a researcher and a teacher. I am actively involved in various public-facing and applied, community projects. In 2010 I co-founded, alongside Victoria Costa, the collaborative organization Cool Anthropology, which is dedicated to bringing the cool, credible concepts anthropological research brings to light out to a wide audience using innovative and collaborative modalities.

Some of the latest community-based and public-facing projects I’ve been fortunate to be part of: