LOEB1929-020 - ethnographic attestation
Coast Miwok
United States - Central California coast - North America
Sacred / spirit
umul Coast Miwok
The Coast Miwok enter Edwin Loeb's 1929 survey of California initiation not through a rite of their own but through a single contrastive line: the bullroarer, he wrote, "has not been reported for central California outside of the Pomo and Coast Miwok," while among the Maidu, on Dixon's authority, it was only a child's toy. Loeb groups the Coast Miwok with the Pomo, Yuki, and Huchnom inside the Ghost ceremony, the masked tribal initiation in which boys lay down as if dead, were covered with straw, then roused to life and bathed. His one detailed account of bullroarers in that rite is Pomo: they sounded inside the subterranean ghost house while the women and children kept outside were told the noise was the voices of the dead. For the Coast Miwok the instrument is attested only by that grouping, with no separate description of its use.
The bullroarer has not been reported for central California outside of the Pomo and Coast Miwok. Dixon describes it as a child's toy among the Maidu.
Loeb 1929, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, UC Publications in Am. Arch. and Ethn. 25(3):269
- Function
- Loeb says central California bullroarer use has not been reported outside Pomo and Coast Miwok.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- p. 269