MINE2026-087 - ethnographic attestation
Trumai kuth / huri huri bullroarer, Upper Xingu
Brazil - Upper Xingu, Mato Grosso - South America - Amazonia
Restricted
kuth; uríuri (shared with Kamayurá); huri huri English; Portuguese
Source term: bull roarer / zunidor
kuth = the Trumai bull roarer, its rites 'buried'; uríuri = the word for bull roarer in both Kamayurá and Trumai (Murphy & Quain 1955, p. 9); huri huri = the same name as recorded in Guirardello-Damian 2011, with huri huri wal the zunidor-making ritual.
By 1938 the Trumai told Buell Quain that they had “buried the kuth”: the rite was no longer performed, but most adults remembered travelling to the Kamayurá village for ceremonies where men “did things that the women cannot see.” The bullroarer’s name survives as uríuri or huri huri, along with the remembered pequi-festival rite for making it. The instruments themselves outlived the rite: three blades Herrmann Meyer collected near the Rio Culuene in 1896 — one still carrying its whirling cord — sit today in Leipzig's GRASSI museum.
As the Trumaí express it, they have "buried the kuth" (bull roarer), but most of the adult men knew the ritual connected with it and remembered when it was still in use.
Murphy & Quain, The Trumai Indians of Central Brazil (1955), p. 71.
- Object
- Not described; no specimen survives from the Trumai themselves.
- Function
- Defunct kuth rites remembered by adult men in 1938: dancing in the Trumai village preceded a joint ceremony at the Kamayurá village where they 'did things that the women cannot see.' A making-ritual, huri huri wal, is remembered as part of the pequi festival.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Aldeia Três Lagoas, a current Trumai village anchor; the sources are culture-wide, not site-specific.
- Source location
Page references
Murphy & Quain 1955, pp. 9, 71; Guirardello-Damian 2011, pp. 144-145, 150-151
- Snake-linked
- Forbidden to women