LOEB1929-034 - ethnographic attestation
Gros Ventre
United States - Northern Plains - North America
Play / practical
nakaantan Gros Ventre (Atsina; Algonquian, Plains)
making cold
Etymology. Kroeber records that the Gros Ventre called both the bull-roarer and the buzzer nakaantan, "making cold" (the same word they used for the thermometer), which he derives from the widespread Indian idea that the bull-roarer breeds wind. (high confidence)
In his 1929 survey sorting the peoples for whom the bullroarer is the dreaded voice of a spirit from those for whom it is only a plaything, Loeb placed the Gros Ventre of the Northern Plains among the playthings. Drawing on Leslie Spier's data from western North America, he noted that while the closely related Arapaho whirled the instrument to raise wind, as did the Klamath, and the Havasupai, San Carlos Apache, and Papago used it to call rain, "among the Gros Ventre and Paiute it is only a toy." In this account no spirit speaks through it, no taboo keeps women from it, and no initiation rite attaches to it; it is logged as a child's instrument and nothing more.
The Havasupai, San Carlos Apache, and Papago associate the bullroarer with rain, while the Arapaho and the Klamath have an analogous use, to produce wind. Among the Gros Ventre and Paiute it is only a toy.
Loeb 1929, Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, UCPAAE 25(3):284 (citing Spier, Havasupai Ethnography, AMNH Anthropological Papers 29:290, 1928)
- Function
- Loeb cites Spier that the instrument is only a toy among the Gros Ventre.
- Map confidence
- low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb
- Source location
- p. 284
- Toy / secular survival