ATL1966-001 - museum specimen

Commensacq Guidanson burrumbe rhombe

Landes - Gascogne - Europe - Southwest France

Weather / fertility magic

On 21 June 1965, in his workshop in the Guidanson quarter of Commensacq, in the pine country of the Landes de Gascogne, Léonce Mano made a whirled wooden board and played it for the ethnomusicologists Claudie Marcel-Dubois and Maguy Pichonnet-Andral, who recorded him as he spun it; Marcel-Dubois photographed him at the bench. He called it a burrumbe, the local name for the rhombe. Its museum record is blunt about what such boards were for: one 'served until 1939 to drive the wild boar from the maize.' As it was told to the two researchers, the sound would put a boar or a wolf to flight, and pigs — herded in the open by young boys — were kept out of the cultivated fields the same way. The rhombe Mano made, twenty-nine notches cut along its half-metre blade, entered the Mucem collections, and the recording of him playing it survives in the Landes survey archive.

Servait jusqu'en 1939 à écarter les sangliers du maïs.

It served until 1939 to drive the wild boar from the maize.

POP/Joconde notice 50020062497 (Mucem 1966.114.4)

Object

Mucem 1966.114.4.1-2: a 47.5 cm white-wood (fir) rhombe with twenty-nine notches cut along the blade, and its cord, made by Léonce Mano during the 1965-1966 Landes field survey; Les Réveillées links it to photographs of Mano making and playing the instrument.

Function

Whirled to drive wild boar from the maize; the museum records the use as current until 1939.

Map confidence

high - Commensacq commune anchor from the source locality; the source narrows the workshop/neighborhood to Guidanson but not a public house coordinate.

Source location

Page references

Les Reveillees object page; contextual article; Mucem inventory 1966.114.4; Joconde 50020062497

• Agriculture / crop magic

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