Atsugewi Hat Creek children's bullroarer

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 despite the warning, 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.

Particulars

Object

Bullroarer of wood; neither ethnography gives dimensions, cord detail or an Atsugewi name.

Function

Children twirled it for fun but adults stopped them because its sound could cause sickness.