MUS2026-002 - museum specimen
Canela (Ramkokamekra) bull-roarer (museum specimen)
Brazil - Maranhão (Sardinha) - South America
Restricted
pimpó Canela Ramkokamekrá (Timbira, Jê; Maranhão, Brazil)
Source term: bull-roarer
Pimpó: the Canela Ramkokamekrá name for the bull-roarer, entered as the nome étnico of the three 1950 Museu do Índio specimens 3282-3284. Nimuendajú's own Canela term, printed in 1946, is a different word and its diacritics are unrecoverable from the scan.
Among the Ramkokamekra-Canela of Maranhão the bull-roarer belonged to the pepye — the youths shut away in the second initiation. Curt Nimuendajú, taken into the tribe as a participant, only later learned its work: after nightfall and before dawn the class leader swung it, the alarm passing from cell to cell, and any initiate who did not stir was reckoned asleep and punished by the commandant. Once he overheard two pepye trade the proof: "Did you hear my bull-roarer this noon?" "Yes!" "I thought you were asleep." The vanished Chakamekra had made larger and finer ones; by Nimuendajú's day the instrument had dwindled at initiation, though it had plainly once counted for more. This specimen is held in the Smithsonian's anthropology collections. Three more, bought from the collector Roberto Tamára in 1950 out of Aldeia do Ponto on the Corda River, are in the Museu do Índio in Rio: oblong boards of 27, 25 and 22 cm, each pierced beside one end with a single cotton thread, catalogued as sounded at festivals and games. The Canela called them pimpó.
Although it is now an instrument of comparative insignificance among the Ramkokamekran (Canella), it formerly played a greater part at initiation, especially among the nowadays extinct Chakamekra.
Zerries 1953, "The Bull-Roarer among South American Indians," Revista do Museu Paulista, n.s. vol. VII:294
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Canela (Ramkokamekra), in the collection of Smithsonian NMNH (NMNH Anthropology). The Museu do Indio (FUNAI, Rio de Janeiro) holds three companion Canela pimpo, items 3282-3284, each catalogued in identical words as an oblong wooden board pierced next to one of its ends, a single cotton thread hanging from the hole; lengths 27.2, 25.2 and 21.8 cm.
- Function
- Canela/Ramkokamekra bull-roarer formerly played a greater part in initiation and was operated by initiates.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
Page references
NMNH Anthropology | Museu do Indio items 3282-3284
- Initiation rite