Sensory Ecologies of Therapeutics: Anti-Coloniality, Heritage Practices and Community Healing

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Belizean Maya and Garifuna communities, this paper forefronts the therapeutics of sensory experience in traditional healing practice. Exploring the sensory aspects of daily ecological interactions and asking which ways community heritage practices become constitutive of healing practices, it engages the embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework to ask how these practices respond to ongoing forces of imperial projects. This paper brings together research around Indigenous land rights and identity-making in times of change with the author's personal experience of grief and collective healing toward a sensory ecology of therapeutics as a responsive, anti-colonial, community healing practice.