The Bullroarer Atlas

No. DRUCKER1950-011

Hartley Bay bullroarer

Canada · Hartley Bay, Douglas Channel mouth, British Columbia · North America · Northwest Coast

Play / practical

The Bristol Bay object itself: two separate wooden parts, a long leaf-shaped blade below and a narrow handle above, with frayed commercial thread at their left ends.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Leaf-shaped Yup’ik blade on a wooden handle, Bristol Bay. Image source

Source term: bullroarer

Among the Gitga’at at Hartley Bay, at the mouth of Douglas Channel, the bullroarer was a handled slat and a child’s toy.

Particulars

Object
A wooden slat swung on a cord fastened to a handle, the standard form all along this coast. Neither dimensions nor material recorded.
Function
A child's toy.

Source

Philip Drucker, Culture Element Distributions: XXVI, Northwest Coast, University of California Anthropological Records 9(3) (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 161–163, 199, 268

View the source · archived

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