Nicolas Arms

NICOLAS ARMS, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California was approved for funding April 2023 to aid research on “Oral Culture and Human-environment Relationships among the Comcaac,” supervised by Dr. William F. Hanks. This ethnographic study explores how oral narrative, song, naming systems, and other forms of symbolic expression shed light on human-environment relationships among the Comcaac or Seri people of the central Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. Focusing on the struggle of the Comcaac to maintain and defend a way of life based on hunting, fishing, and gathering, it aims to understand the cultural values that have motivated and shaped their history of persistence. Fieldwork carried out during the funding period took place in and around the Comcaac community of El Desemboque del Río San Ignacio and combined the documentation of land-based practices with more than 150 ethnographic and linguistic interviews. Drawing connections across a range of topics, from cosmology and shamanism to foraging and botanical nomenclature, the research identified a series of key concepts and values in terms of which human relationships with the nonhuman world are imbued with meaning in Cmiique Iitom or Seri-language discourse. The project’s results challenge agrocentric perspectives in contemporary hunter-gatherer studies and demonstrate the importance of foregrounding Indigenous-language oral culture in the anthropology of human-environment relationships.