The Bullroarer Atlas

NAGA-003 - museum specimen

Angami Khonoma boys toy and bird-scarer bullroarer

Naga Hills - present Nagaland - South Asia - Northeast India

Play / practical

Roy’s Illustration 17 item 1 is the 19-inch Angami bullroarer from Khonoma, recorded as a toy.
Roy’s Illustration 17 item 1 is the 19-inch Angami bullroarer from Khonoma, recorded as a toy. · Public domain Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

When the Angami grain ripened at Khonoma, the fields filled with noise. Hutton counted scarecrows without number — basket-work hawks, cane hoops, human dummies swinging on bamboos, clappers that rapped in every gust, even a water-driven automaton rigged up at Jessami — and the village kept a genna, the Likwengi, marking the millet harvest and its season of "field-scaring." Into that din a boy could add his own: this forty-one-centimetre slat, swung on a cord until it roared. Half plaything, half bird-scarer, it was collected here by J. H. Hutton in 1922.

Bull-roarer used as a toy by boys or for scaring birds. Angami, Khonoma village.

Cambridge Naga Database, Pitt Rivers Museum collection record (collected J. H. Hutton, 1922)
Object
41 cm bullroarer, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, acc. 1923.84.958; collected and donated by J. H. Hutton, 1922-23 gift. Cambridge Naga Database photograph record C624.
Function
Boys toy or bird-scarer
Map confidence
high - Khonoma village source locality not museum
Source location
Page references

collection listing C624 | PRM acc. 1923.84.958; Roy 1928 Illustration 17 item 1

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