The Bullroarer Atlas

CROVETTO1968-002 - primary ethnography

Vilela

Argentina - Eastern Chaco - South America - Gran Chaco

Play / practical

Representative—not this record’s object: an Eastern Mataco/Wichí bullroarer from the Bermejo River country the Vilela once held.
Representative—not this record’s object: an Eastern Mataco/Wichí bullroarer from the Bermejo River country the Vilela once held. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Am1937-0316-28-a) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

kiré ajlipié Spanish

Source term: palo zumbador

kiré ajlipié = 'el palo da vueltas' (the stick that spins).

When the botanist Raúl Martínez-Crovetto went looking for Vilela games in the 1960s, he could ask almost no one: his sources were Basilia López, 58, and her husband Juan Álvarez, 68 — two of the last speakers of a language then already dying out in the eastern Chaco. They remembered the kiré ajlipié, 'the stick that spins': a slip of guayacán wood on a metre of caraguatá-fibre cord, swung from a small perforated handle, a children's toy of the century's first years. Little else of a Vilela childhood was left to record.

Con una tablita delgada de guayacán (Caesalpinia paraguariensis), de unos 15 ó 20 cm de largo por 2 cm de ancho, de forma rectangular, construían el 'palo zumbador'. Los niños lo usaban como juguete.

With a thin rectangular board of guayacán wood, some 15 or 20 cm long by 2 cm wide, they built the palo zumbador. The children used it as a toy.

Martínez-Crovetto, 'Algunos juegos de los indios vilelas,' Etnobiológica 5 (1968), p. 11.
Object
Rectangular guayacán board about 15-20 by 2 cm, pierced at one end; a one-metre caraguatá-fibre cord joins it to a small perforated handle.
Function
Children's toy of the early twentieth century.
Map confidence
high - Eastern Chaco cultural-area anchor; source names no specific community.
Source location
p. 11

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