The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-006

Jemez roarer kept in silence

United States · Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico · North America · Southwest

Function not recorded

A pale Hopi wooden slat in Oslo, attached at one end to a long braided cord.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Hopi bullroarer in Oslo, a pale wooden slat on a long braided cord. CC BY-SA · Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Whirled on its cord, a bullroarer makes a low, carrying moan — and at Walatowa it is forbidden to photograph, record or even sketch a ceremony. This one survives as words alone: the National Museum of the American Indian withholds its picture. Albert Reagan, a government schoolteacher, probably collected it around 1901–1902 and sold it to the museum in 1919; his published study of Jemez dancing never mentions a bullroarer. When Elsie Clews Parsons gathered tales at Jemez in 1925, one narrator left his deliberately unfinished, so no outsider would ever hold the whole.

Particulars

Object
Carved wood and hide bull-roarer of the Jemez (Walatowa), NMAI catalog no. 9/4632, collected by the Indian Service teacher Albert B. Reagan probably in 1901-02 and sold by him to the Museum of the American Indian in 1919. The museum withholds the image as culturally sensitive.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, catalog no. 9/4632 (collected by Albert B. Reagan; purchased 1919) View
  2. Albert B. Reagan, 'Dances of the Jemez Pueblo Indians,' Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 20 (1906): 241-272 View
  3. Elsie Clews Parsons, The Pueblo of Jemez (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925) View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.