{"id":"GOODY1972-001","label":"The Night Cow of Birifu","people_or_site":"LoDagaa (LoWiili) of Birifu","country_current":"Ghana","historic_region":"Birifu, Lawra District, Northern Territories of the Gold Coast","macroregion":"Africa / West Africa","local_name":"tinsoo naab","source_term":"tinsoo naab","source_language":"English","object_description":"Not described; named only as a bull-roarer.","function_summary":"The instrument of a minor Birifu cult called the Night Cow, whose initiatory content is the discovery that the cow is really a bull-roarer. Bears on health and well-being; involves the killing of fowls; non-initiates (dakume) include those forbidden to join. Goody judged the association moribund by his fieldwork.","attestation_type":"ethnographic_attestation","source_key":"goody1972_myth_of_the_bagre","source_type":"primary_ethnography","source_url":"https://archive.org/details/jack-goody-the-myth-of-the-bagre-clarendon-press-1972","page_or_plate":"pp. 38, 48","map_confidence":"medium","plot_status":"plot","coordinate_basis":"Birifu village, Lawra District, Upper West Region — Goody's own fieldwork parish, named in the passage. Approximate; sited just southeast of Lawra town.","jade_complex_role":"","blurb":"Something moved through the Birifu night making a noise, and the noise was a cow — the Night Cow, tinsoo naab, which had a small cult of its own among the LoDagaa of northwest Ghana. To be let into it was to learn one thing: that the cow is really a bull-roarer. The monster was a board on a string. The cult bore on health and well-being, and fowls were killed in it, and it kept a closed door — those outside it, the not-yet-initiated and those forbidden ever to join, were called dakume, the same word the great Bagre society used for its own excluded. By Jack Goody's time at Birifu the adults did not take the Night Cow seriously. It looked to him like an association on the way out: a monster in the last stage of becoming a rumour.","pull_quote":"","pull_quote_translation":"","pull_quote_cite":"","term_gloss":"\"the Night Cow\" (Goody's own translation)","cls":"restricted","class_label":"Restricted","color":"#A43C2F","is_candidate":false,"flags":["spirit_voice","initiation"],"f_jade_complex":false,"f_women_taboo":false,"f_women_special":false,"f_snake":false,"sources":[{"citation":"Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 38","url":"https://archive.org/details/jack-goody-the-myth-of-the-bagre-clarendon-press-1972"}],"source_citations":"Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 38","source_display":"Jack Goody, The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 38","date_citation_display":"","object_display":"Not described; named only as a bull-roarer.","function_display":"The instrument of a minor Birifu cult called the Night Cow, whose initiatory content is the discovery that the cow is really a bull-roarer. Bears on health and well-being; involves the killing of fowls; non-initiates (dakume) include those forbidden to join. Goody judged the association moribund by his fieldwork.","confidence_display":"medium","attestation_label":"ethnographic attestation","etymology_hedge":"","people_key":"lodagaa birifu","display_name":"The Night Cow of Birifu","image":{"full":"assets/objects/GOODY1972-001_goody1972-001-lobi-kambou1993.png","thumb":"assets/objects/GOODY1972-001_goody1972-001-lobi-kambou1993_thumb.jpg","alt":"A drawing of a flat rectangular Lobi rhombe with short surface marks and a cord looped through one end.","credit":"Tô Joseph-Antoine Kambou, Images d’Afrique et sciences sociales, 1993, p.363","license":"© author / IRD (ORSTOM); published figure rehosted for non-commercial research; rights not cleared","source_page":"https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:37436","rehosted":true,"representative":true,"caption":"Lobi rhombe, Kambou 1993, p.363."},"slug":"goody1972-001-lodagaa-lowiili-of-birifu"}