The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-195

Shipaulovi Hopi tovolpi, for dance and play

United States · Second Mesa, Arizona · North America · Southwest

Sacred / spirit

Shipaulovi tovolpi with its painted blade, cord, and wooden toggle.
Plate I. Shipaulovi tovolpi with its painted blade, cord, and wooden toggle. CC BY-SA · Image source
For comparison, another Hopi bullroarer, in the Musée du quai Branly: a painted slat with a lightning stripe, corded to a red handle stick.
Plate II. For comparison, another Hopi bullroarer, in the Musée du quai Branly: a painted slat with a lightning stripe, corded to a red handle stick. Image source

tovolpi

tovolpi — the Shipaulovi form; compare tovokinpi at neighbouring Shongopovi.

Shipaulovi, smallest of the Second Mesa villages, kept its own form of the Hopi bullroarer's name: tovolpi. After the village's Snake race, boys and girls ran up the hill with cornstalks and melons for the crowd to snatch, and behind them came a man dressed as a warrior, in white kilt and antelope skin, twirling a whizzer. The decorated slat that carried the word to Norway crossed between two worlds at home — swung by men in the dances, and by children as a toy — the same humming wood serving the plaza ceremony and the game beside it.

Particulars

Object
Decorated wooden slat with one terminal hole, single fibre cord and toggle — Kulturhistorisk museum Oslo UEM13727, acquired via Ole M. Solberg.
Function
Used partly by men in dances, partly by children as a toy.

Source

Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo, UEM13727; J. Walter Fewkes, Tusayan Snake Ceremonies, 16th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (1897), pp. 283-284

View the source · archived

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