The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-012 - museum specimen

Mapuche

Araucanía, Chile - South America - Southern Cone

Sacred / spirit

A Maxakalí bull-roarer from Minas Gerais, Brazil, with cord and wound handle stick — collected by Curt Nimuendajú in 1939 (Museum of World...
Representative image. A Maxakalí bull-roarer from Minas Gerais, Brazil, with cord and wound handle stick — collected by Curt Nimuendajú in 1939 (Museum of World Culture, CC0) — shown as a South American representative; the Mapuche instrument of Araucanía documented here has not been photographed. Världskulturmuseet, Gothenburg (1946.03.0049); collected by Curt Nimuendajú, 1939 CC0 Image source

Furfurcabue English

Source term: bull-roarer

farfarun (Mapudungun): the whirring/whistling noise made in the air by a whirled rod; the instrument is colloquially the "run run" in Chilean Spanish.

A bull-roarer collected as Mapuche, from the Araucania of southern Chile, now in the Smithsonian's anthropology collections. The specimen record itself notes only the object type, but Mapuche organology gives the form a function: the whirled slat on a cord, called "run run" and its airy whirr farfarun in Mapudungun, was sounded not as music but to frighten off evil spirits. In Chiloe a long strap of seaweed is still whirled at midnight to drive away the trauco, the woodland spirit, the noise said to madden it. The leading scholar of Mapuche music records the use plainly while warning the evidence is thin, with no initiatory cult or secrecy attached.

Una especie de "run run" que era o es antes que un instrumento musico, un instrumento para espantar a los malos espiritus.

A kind of "run run" that was, or is, before being a musical instrument, an instrument for frightening away evil spirits.

Oreste Plath (1955), quoted in J. Perez de Arce, Musica Mapuche (2007), p. 293
Object
Bull-roarer of the Mapuche, Smithsonian NMNH (NMNH Anthropology). Harvard 09-21-30/74707 is a companion specimen: a flat perforated coligue-wood blade, 38.1 x 2 x 0.4 cm, labelled Furfurcabue and 'spun-round,' acquired in 1909.
Function
Whirled to frighten off evil spirits: the Mapuche run-run was an apotropaic noisemaker before it was music, surviving in Chiloé as the midnight seaweed-whirl against the trauco (Plath 1955; Pérez de Arce 2007). No cult or secrecy attaches.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Perez de Arce, Musica Mapuche (2007), p. 293 | Harvard 09-21-30/74707

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