Amis bnbn toy and bird-scarer bullroarer

bnbn

Source term: Bnbn (bullroarer)

bnbn — Amis name for the bullroarer, onomatopoeic

Etymology. Cheng treats the Amis form as onomatopoeic.

Among the Amis of eastern Taiwan the bullroarer is called bnbn, a name the ethnomusicologist Lancini Jen-hao Cheng records as onomatopoeic. At Ciwidiyan — Shuilian village on the Hualien coast — it was a childhood toy and a crop-guard, swung to scare birds off the fields. When Cheng visited, the sub-tribe's chieftain De-rang Sung, a primary-school teacher, was making bnbn with his pupils so the plaything would pass down: bamboo sawn and shaved to a slender oval, a hole drilled at the top, a cotton string tied through.

Nowadays, the bnbn is not simply a toy, but it is an indicator of Amis cultural revival. For Amis elders, playing bnbn (the bullroarer) helps invoke childhood memories.

Cheng, Taxonomies of Taiwanese Aboriginal Musical Instruments (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2015), §6.1.13, p. 341

Particulars

Object

Bamboo shaved to a slender oval, holed at the top and strung with cotton. The wooden bnbn kept in the Academia Sinica's ethnology museum is a tapering slat about 17.5 cm long and 2.5 cm wide.

Function

Children's toy or bird-scarer used to protect arable crops.