The Bullroarer Atlas

KUNST2026-003 - museum specimen

Aranda / Arrernte

Central Australia (Aranda - Arrernte country)

Restricted Candidate only

The object itself: engraved Aranda churinga from the Baldwin Spencer collection (MAE, 1908), with a small perforation at the narrow tip....
The object itself: engraved Aranda churinga from the Baldwin Spencer collection (MAE, 1908), with a small perforation at the narrow tip. Kunstkamera exhibition photograph, 2008. © МАЭ РАН, Кунсткамера (выставка «Чуринга — знак предков», 2008) Image source

чуринга (tjurunga) Russian

Source term: чуринга — знак предков (Kunstkamera exhibition)

In Aranda (Arrernte), «чуринга» (tjurunga) marks the sacred, secret, and hidden — most often the flat engraved stones and boards of the totemic ancestors.

Etymology. In Arrernte, churinga (tjurunga) means 'sacred, secret': Spencer and Gillen gloss it as a term applied both to the sacred objects and to the sacred quality they possess — above all the engraved stones and boards of the totemic ancestors, whose smaller perforated wooden members are the whirled bull-roarers (churinga irula, 'wooden churinga or bull-roarer'). Each board houses the spirit of the ancestor who carried it, so the bull-roarer shares its name with the entire class of ancestor-spirit boards. (high confidence)

For Aranda initiates, a churinga was not merely a decorated board. It held the continuing presence of an ancestral being and could be revealed to a young man as his “other body.” This pierced example may belong to the class that could be swung, but its surviving exhibition record does not identify it as a bullroarer.

Право прикасаться к чурингам и даже видеть их принадлежит только мужчинам, прошедшим сложные обряды инициации.

The right to touch churingas — and even to see them — belongs only to men who have passed through the complex rites of initiation.

Kunstkamera, «Чуринга — знак предков» exhibition (2008)
Object
Elongated pointed-oval wooden churinga engraved with concentric-circle designs and pierced near one narrow tip; entered the Kunstkamera with Baldwin Spencer’s collection in 1908.
Function
Secret-sacred ancestral board shown only to initiated men; bullroarer use for this particular object remains unconfirmed.
Map confidence
medium_high - Alice Springs region, heart of Aranda country and of Spencer & Gillen's Central Australian fieldwork
Source location
Kunstkamera exhibition page, «Чуринга — знак предков» (2008)

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