The Bullroarer Atlas

NA-S1952-006 - secondary catalog

Cupeno

United States - California - North America

Play / practical

A plain, pale wooden board with a cord knotted through a hole near one end - another of the Oslo museum's Hopi bullroarers, standing in for the...
Representative image. A plain, pale wooden board with a cord knotted through a hole near one end - another of the Oslo museum's Hopi bullroarers, standing in for the unphotographed Cupeño example this page records. Kulturhistorisk museum, Universitetet i Oslo (Etnografisk) (UEM29633/e) CC BY-SA Image source

Source term: bullroarer

Among the Cupeño of the mountain valley around Warner Springs in southern California, the bullroarer is recorded as a signal for assembling people; the survey that lists it gives no description of the object or of the occasion at which it was whirled. The Cupeño were closely tied by language and ritual to their Luiseño and Cahuilla neighbors, and among the Luiseño the bull-roarer, a whirling-board called mumlapish, was sounded by the chief during the Image ceremony for the dead, who whirled it three times as a signal to the singers.

Then the chief takes a whirling-board, or bull-roarer, mumlapish.

DuBois 1908, The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California
Function
Instrument used as a signal for assembling people
Map confidence
medium - regional_anchor: Representative Cupeno/Warner Springs area anchor; no exact site in Seder summary
Source location
51-54

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