The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-109 - museum specimen

Mentawai bull-roarer (museum)

Indonesia - Pagai Islands, Mentawai Islands - Southeast Asia

Function not recorded

A long slender stick strung at one end with a small diamond-shaped.
Representative — not this record’s object. · A long slender stick strung at one end with a small diamond-shaped. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

A bull-roarer collected from the Mentawai of the Pagai Islands, off the west coast of Sumatra, and held in the Smithsonian's anthropology collection. No use was recorded with it, and the classic account of Pagai ritual — E. M. Loeb's Mentawei Religious Cult (1929) — knows no whirled instrument at all: in the punen ceremonies the sounds that called the souls of the people were the gong, traded in from the Malays, and the beaten tudrukat log drums. Whatever this slat did on the islands went unwritten.

Object
Bull-roarer of the Mentawai, Smithsonian (NMNH/NMAI).
Function
Not recorded.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Page references

nmnhanthropology_8364845 / ark:/65665/3b0c69735-2a63-4d4f-bdf6-a089dd53d1cd

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