MUS2026-044 - museum specimen
Kamaiurá
Brazil - Upper Xingu, Mato Grosso - South America
Restricted
Source term: bull-roarer
In the Kamaiurá origin story the women were the first flute-players, until two male twins, Sun and Moon, drove them off by bellowing through the bullroarer the Kamaiurá call hori hori; in the women's flight the men seized the sacred flutes, the jakui, for themselves. Those flutes are kept in the house of the flutes, the tapuwí, built at the center of the village where all the trails converge, and only men may see and touch them; women are forbidden the sight on pain of gang rape. This bull-roarer entered the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1960, recorded as a Kamaiurá instrument from the Upper Xingu of Mato Grosso.
The Kamayura say that two male twins, Sun and Moon, scared women flutists away by bellowing through their HORI HORI (bullroarer). As a result, the women left behind their instruments, which were then captured by the twins.
Barron, "Gender Ideology Reflected in the Flute Symbology of Various New Guinea and South American Indian Cultures"
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Kamaiurá, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1960.6.20).
- Function
- A men's-restricted instrument: in the Xingu origin myth twin culture-heroes drive the women off by sounding it and then seize the women's sacred flutes, which women may no longer see.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate Kamaiurá (Ipavu) area, Upper Xingu
- Source location
- 1960.6.20
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth