JSTEWARD1933-001 - ethnographic description
Owens Valley Paiute boys’ bullroarer
United States - Owens Valley, Inyo and Mono counties, eastern California - North America
Play / practical
Source term: Bullroarer
A foot of thin board, an inch wide and a quarter-inch thick, holed at one end and hung on two feet of string from a notch cut in an eighteen-inch stick - and in Owens Valley that was the whole of it. No rain came of it, no dead spoke through it, no one was kept from seeing it. Grown men there still remembered swinging them as boys. Steward went down the instrument list of the valley with some care, marking the drum absent and the musical rasp absent and crediting rasps instead to the Paiute up at Pyramid Lake, so the roarer’s smallness here is a thing recorded rather than a thing unasked.
A small, round stick, 18 inches long, serves as handle; a 2-foot string fastened to a notch in one end of it passes through a hole in a board 12 by 1 by 1/4 inch, which is swung. A small boy’s toy.
Steward 1933:278
- Object
- A board 12 by 1 by 1/4 inches, holed and swung on a 2-foot string tied to a notch in one end of a small round stick 18 inches long, which serves as the handle.
- Function
- A small boy’s toy; no ceremonial or weather use is recorded, and Steward records none for the valley.
- Source
- Julian H. Steward, Ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 33:3 (1933), printed p. 278, in the musical-instrument sequence between the musical bow and musical rasps; Verbatim: "Bullroarer.-A small, round stick, 18 inches long, serves as handle; a 2-foot string fastened to a notch…
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 278; cross-referenced from the toys section
- Source confidence
- medium Bishop, Owens Valley regional anchor; Steward’s Owens Valley Paiute run the length of the valley from Bishop to Lone Pine and the description is not tied to one settlement.