EXH2026-028 - ethnographic attestation
Kagaba (Kogi)
Colombia - Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta - South America - Northwest
Play / practical
seibuka German
Source term: seibuka (das Schwirrholz)
seibuká — Kágaba (Kogi) name for the bullroarer, containing the root ibusi "to sling, throw" (Preuss cites it, with sibuká "the one spinning a thread," to etymologize ábukaj, the powder packet "that throws out the powder").
Etymology. Preuss ties `seibuka` to `ibusi`, to sling or throw, giving a real morphological lead for the term. (high confidence)
No people in South America gave their priests more and their bullroarer less. The Kágaba (Kogi) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta live under the rule of the máma priesthood: future priests are shut away for nine years — the greatest for twice nine — in darkness, without salt, learning the songs of Gauteovan, the Mother of Fire, who bore the sun, the rain, the rivers, the thunders, "the dance and the songs, the festival-implements and the temples, and all things." Their sacred sounds are masked speech to the four directions, flutes, drums, and a wing-conch trumpet the ancestors ordered kept from the seashore. Into all this the seibuká enters Konrad Theodor Preuss's monograph only as a word — built on ibusi, "to hurl" — with a single footnote for its whole ethnography: "used only by boys." In one of the most priest-governed cosmologies on the continent, the whirring board belonged to the children.
Wird nur von Knaben benützt.
Used only by boys.
Preuss, "Forschungsreise zu den Kágaba-Indianern," Anthropos 14–15 (1919/20), p. 1049 n. 1
- Object
- Bullroarer; name derived by Preuss from ibusi 'to sling/throw' - 'the thing flung through the air'.
- Function
- Boys' plaything per Preuss's footnote ('Wird nur von Knaben benützt', p. 1049 n. 1); no ritual use recorded anywhere in his Kágaba corpus.
- Map confidence
- medium - Kogi heartland, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
- Source location
- Anthropos 14-15, p. ~1049