GARTH1953-001 - ethnographic attestation
Atsugewi (Atsuge and Apwaruge)
United States - Hat Creek and Dixie Valley - North America - California
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
bull-roarer: English fieldwork term; no Atsugewi name recovered.
At Hat Creek, children twirled a bullroarer for fun until adults stopped them: the sound itself, they warned, was liable to bring sickness and misfortune — the same fate that awaited a child who whirled a burning brand around his head. The Atsugewi had little patience for idleness of any kind: 'he doesn't know how to sleep' was their highest praise, and the lazy man — the Brumui, naked, propertyless, starving through winter — stood at the very bottom of the social scale. John LaMar still remembered making a bullroarer anyway, as an Apwaruge boy.
JL stated that he had made a bull-roarer as a child, but that children were ordinarily not allowed to use bull-roarers for they were liable to bring sickness and misfortune.
Thomas R. Garth, Atsugewi Ethnography (1953), p. 175.
- Object
- Bullroarer reported as a children's whirled sound instrument; the ethnographies do not describe its construction.
- Function
- Children twirled it for fun but adults stopped them because its sound could cause sickness.
- Map confidence
- medium - Cassel / Hat Creek regional anchor. Voegelin's positive account is Hat Creek; Garth's positive maker was Apwaruge, associated with Fall River Mills and later Dixie Valley.
- Source location
- Garth p. 175; Voegelin p. 94
- Toy / secular survival