The Bullroarer Atlas

No. CARLSON1994-001

Vû of Farakala

Mali · Kampwo, west of Sikasso, Sikasso Region · West Africa

Function not recorded

Low-contrast catalogue-page photograph of an arm extending a thin cord over open ground, illustrating the Ndut gum paxa bullroarer; the blade itself is indistinct.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Ndut gum paxa bullroarer suspended on its cord Image source

vû

Source term: bull-roarer

vû (with initial floating low tone): Supyire 'bull-roarer'.

The Supyire have a single syllable for the bullroarer: vû, falling from high to low, with a low tone floating unspoken in front of it. They are farmers of southeastern Mali who grow cereals and keep livestock, in villages that never answered to any authority above the village until the Jula kingdom of Sikasso, then French West Africa, then Mali took them in. By their own tradition they came from the south, where most Senufo peoples still live. It is the word at Farakala, forty kilometres west of Sikasso, and the villages around it.

Particulars

Object
Not recorded.

Source

Robert Carlson, A Grammar of Supyire (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 1–3, 50

View the source

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.