MULLER2010-001 - ethnographic attestation
Piaroa / Wothuja
Venezuela - Middle and upper Orinoco - Amazonas - South America
Restricted
Imu-chuwo Spanish
Source term: palo zumbador
Imu-chuwo = the howler monkey (araguato) whose voice the palo zumbador represents.
The Piaroa, famed among anthropologists for their gentleness, hold one great masked festival: the Warime. It re-enacts the oldest feast in the world — the meal the demiurge Wajari set before his cannibal father-in-law Kuemoi at the mountain of Pureido, in the age when Wajari was building the world that Anamain, the force of light, had dreamed. The unseen voices that circle the roundhouse at night are the demiurges themselves, vital breath turned to music, family come back to be fed. Among them whirls the Imu-chuwo, roaring with the howler monkey's voice — the child of Worá. And Worá is Cheheru, Wajari's only sister, mistress of gardens and of the prayers against sickness. Cheheru fell in love with Chuvó, her brother's own musical voice. Her desire was incest; it destroyed the being who sang, and Wajari avenged it with the diseases and, through them, death — dealt first to his sister's own children. That is why women may hear the voices but never see them. Yet it is a woman, mistress of the house, who receives the masked ancestors and answers them song for song.
Imu-chuwo, el mono araguato, cuya voz es representada por un palo zumbador, que consiste en una placa oblonga de madera atada por un extremo a un hilo que tiene el ejecutante en la mano.
Imu-chuwo, the howler monkey, whose voice is represented by a bullroarer: an oblong wooden plate tied at one end to a cord held by the player.
Milagros Müller, 'La performance aborigen,' Aisthesis 47 (2010), p. 313.
- Object
- Oblong wooden plate tied at one end to a cord held in the player's hand.
- Function
- Warime sacred voice of the howler monkey; women and the uninitiated may hear but not see the instruments. The exclusion is grounded in the myth in which the appropriation of a Warime voice brought disease and death into the world.
- Map confidence
- medium - Piaroa/Wothuja middle-upper-Orinoco culture-area anchor; source names no village.
- Source location
- p. 313
- Spirit voice
- Forbidden to women