The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-113 - museum specimen

Kuikuro

Brazil - Upper Xingu, Mato Grosso - South America - Amazonia

Play / practical

Two Kuikuro zunidores from the Upper Xingu, laid out on blue cloth: painted wooden slats banded with dark triangle motifs, one tipped in red...
Two Kuikuro zunidores from the Upper Xingu, laid out on blue cloth: painted wooden slats banded with dark triangle motifs, one tipped in red ochre with a small forked tang, each strung with a cotton cord through a single hole near one end. Museu do Índio / Museu Nacional dos Povos Indígenas (FUNAI), inv. 7697 & 7698 Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

matapu / matahu (Mehinaku-Nahuqua), zunidor (Portuguese): the Upper Xingu bull-roarer, a flat oblong or fish-shaped board whirled on a cord; among the Bakairi called yelo/iyeolo, the word for thunder and lightning.

Among the Carib-speaking Kuikuro and their Upper Xingu neighbours the bull-roarer keeps strikingly modest company. The secrecy and the dread of being seen by women belong to the great hardwood kagutu flutes; the roarer, by contrast, von den Steinen watched the Nahuqua sound on the open village plaza "in all unconcern, as they would any everyday tool, and without the women being driven off." On the Kulisehu river it accompanied festive dances to which women were freely admitted, and it doubled, he noted, as a plaything. The carved Museu do Indio specimen, an oblong board painted in black, red and white, is that object; its voice in Xingu life is the cheerful, public one, not the buried cult that von den Steinen would meet only further off among the Bororo.

Die Nahuqua zeigten uns den Gebrauch auf offenem Dorfplatz in aller Unbefangenheit wie den eines beliebigen Geräts und ohne dass die Frauen weggejagt wurden.

The Nahuqua showed us its use out on the open village plaza, with complete unconcern, as they would that of any everyday implement, and without the women being driven away.

von den Steinen 1894, p. 327, on the Nahuqua (Upper Xingu) bull-roarer (Schwirrholz)
Object
Bull-roarer of the Kuikuro, Museu do Índio / FUNAI.
Function
Official Museu do Indio / FUNAI Tainacan records identify Kuikuro zunidor objects; the recovered object text is morphological only and gives no row-local women evidence.
Map confidence
low - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
von den Steinen 1894, p. 327 (Nahuqua open use + matapu/matahu names), with pp. 307, 328, 497 (via Zerries 1953, Rev. Museu Paulista N.S. VII, pp. 281-283); Tainacan items 52448 / 52433

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