EYLMANN1908-001 - ethnographic attestation
Awarai (Warai)
Australia - Rum Jungle to Brocks Creek, Northern Territory - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: Bullroarer / Schwirrholz (durchbohrter Corrobboreestick)
“May you make bullroarers?” Erhard Eylmann asked an Awarai man in the Rum Jungle country. Yes, came the answer — and the man’s two companions at once set him straight, citing cases in which the old men had ordered younger men to make no bullroarers at all. What punishment awaited a forbidden maker, neither could say. In the far interior a West-Arünta man had described one likely to end in an agonising death; between the north coast and the fifteenth parallel, Eylmann judged, custom was more forgiving.
Als ich an einen Awarai die Frage richtete: „Darfst du Bullroarer anfertigen?“ gab er mir „ja“ zur Antwort. Zwei seiner Genossen, die zugegen waren, suchten ihn darauf eines Besseren zu belehren, indem sie Fälle anführten, wo jüngeren Männern von „old men“ eingeschärft worden war, keine Bullroarer anzufertigen.
When I put the question to an Awarai — “May you make bullroarers?” — he answered “yes.” Two of his companions who were present then set him right, citing cases in which the “old men” had impressed on younger men that they were to make no bullroarers.
Eylmann, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien (1908), p. 198
- Object
- No Awarai specimen described; Eylmann's exchange concerns the class of small pierced 'corroboree sticks' he glosses as Schwirrhoelzer or bullroarers.
- Function
- Manufacture was elder-controlled: old men forbade younger men to make bullroarers; the penalty for a transgressor went unstated.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - South Australian Museum (Tindale) Awarai tribal-area reference coordinate 131deg25'E x 13deg15'S, mid-way in the Rum Jungle-Brocks Creek country the museum assigns to the group; not a ceremony or camp site.
- Source location
- p. 198 (scan n250)