The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-022

Cashinahua spear-point asu

Peru · Upper Purús · Juruá · South America · Upper Amazon

Function not recorded

A red-stained Matsigenka child’s wooden bullroarer from the Río Urubamba, tapering at both ends, with scattered small surface holes and no attached cord.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Slender red-stained Matsigenka child's rhombe from the Río Urubamba, its cord now lost. Image source

asu

Source term: bull-roarer

asu — the Cashinahua (Panoan) name for the palo zumbador in Peru's 1978 national instrument survey; no gloss or use is recorded with it.

The Cashinahua asu is shaped like a weapon: a thin wooden blade cut as a sharp spear point, decorated, twenty centimetres from base to tip, narrowing to a throat where its cord ties on. It belongs to the Cashinahua, a Panoan people of Peru's eastern forests; what they swung it for is lost.

Particulars

Object
Palo zumbador of thin wood in the form of a spear point (sharp triangle), decorated, tied by a cord; the registered example measures 20 cm long, 5 cm across the base, narrowing to 1 cm at a throat where the cord is tied.
Function
Not recorded.

Source

Instituto Nacional de Cultura (Peru), Mapa de los instrumentos musicales de uso popular en el Perú (1978), p. 462, entry 9

View the source · archived

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