Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides

Author

Charles P. Colwell, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Music

Advisor

Eliot Bates

Committee Members

Jane Sugarman

Jason Eckardt

Antoni Pizà

Subject Categories

Environmental Studies | Ethnomusicology | Science and Technology Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

vocal imitation, local naturalist guides, birdsong, interspecies, embodied knowledge, ethno-ornithology

Abstract

The entanglement of culture and nature in human-environmental relations has been widely researched in indigenous knowledge systems and in Western scientific practices. However, the relational dynamics of local naturalists’ vocal correspondence with other species through imitation have yet to be the subject of intensive ethnographic research. This dissertation explores how Costa Rican local naturalist guides employ vocal imitation (imitar) as an embodied way of knowing birds and their vocalizations/singing (cantos), and as a technique for educating ecotourists. I carried out eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork at La Selva Research Station in the rural canton of Sarapiquí, in the northeastern lowlands of Costa Rica. There, I attended to guides’ vocal-imitative practices in the contexts of their daily life and work on ecotours. Through a methodology of sensory ethnography, I integrate sensory-vocal apprenticeship, walking-with, audiovisual techniques, and interviews to understand how naturalists experience and enact their relations with birds through sound.

Since the 1980s, naturalist guides’ specialized imitative practices have developed as a local ornithology in conjunction with guides’ footing in Western ornithological knowledge practices in the intercultural milieu of the research station. I show how, on tours, guides’ imitations of birds’ sounds direct and locate the attention of the guides, the tourists, and birds of a wide array of species. Vocal sound is a crucial channel through which guides perform their place-based knowledge of birds’ singing, while, at the same time, drawing tourists into moments of focused environmental education. In direct correspondence and cohabitation with birds, naturalists strive for igual (identical) imitations in relational acts of hacer el canto—doing the bird’s singing. As a mode of interspecies communication, guides’ imitative practices allow them to shape, navigate, and sustain relations with birds in a particular place. I articulate these human-bird vocal exchanges as entanglements of vocality that unfold through an interplay of interspecies attention, intentions, and affects. Guides’ acts of imitar engrain birds’ singing in embodied memory and in vocal capacities, leaving marks on bodies. This relational, embodied dynamic reconfigures human-bird vocal boundaries, while grounding naturalists’ understanding of birds’ ways of singing.

By involving their own bodies and vocalizing in their knowledge of birds’ singing, guides develop expressive and ethical dispositions toward birds’ behavior and wellbeing. This embodied interspecies ethics shapes naturalists’ positionality toward the use of audio playback for similar purposes of attracting birds and eliciting vocal responses. Thus, I emphasize how guides’ place-based, vocal practices position them as stewards of birds and bird biodiversity. Vocal sound is a process that draws together human and bird ways of life in arrangements of environmental knowledge production and transmission. This ongoing interweaving of interspecies sensing, voicing, and attention is the possibility for emplaced response and responsibility. Tracing these dynamics illuminates how understandings of bird biodiversity in Western scientific research and ecotourism contexts both depend on local ways of knowing and sensing. Thus, in conclusion, this dissertation argues for a rebalancing of epistemologies in models of biodiversity and human-bird cohabitation. This rebalancing should account for local, place-based ornithological methods and the labor of local practitioners in the present and future of multispecies places.

Comments

This essay and the composition, "Quasi una fantasia for flute, oboe, and violoncello [2019–25]," together constitute the author's dissertation but are otherwise unrelated.

Recommended Citation

Colwell, Charles P., "Hacer el Canto: Tracing Entanglements of Vocality and Interspecies Knowledge in the Imitative Practices of Costa Rican Naturalist Guides" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6464