The Bullroarer Atlas

REICHEL1971-001 - ethnographic attestation

Desana

Colombia - Vaupés - upper Rio Negro cultural region - South America - Northwest Amazon

Sacred / spirit

Representative—not this record’s object: a Baniwa bullroarer from the lower Rio Içana, in the same Northwest Amazon world as the Desana; the...
Representative—not this record’s object: a Baniwa bullroarer from the lower Rio Içana, in the same Northwest Amazon world as the Desana; the nurá-mee itself was never photographed. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (16/4242) Image source

nurá-mee English

Source term: bull-roarer / horsefly

nurá-mee = horsefly, from nurirí 'to bite / to insert the penis' + -mee 'the power to produce something' (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, p. 59).

In Desana cosmology the Sun Father committed the first sin: incest with his own daughter, at Wainambí Rapids — and women menstruate to this day, the myth says, so the crime is never forgotten. Repenting, the Creator made its prohibition his principal law, and the bullroarer is his voice still enforcing it. The Desana named the whirled slat nurá-mee, 'horsefly,' from a verb meaning both to bite and to insert the penis: the buzzing, stinging insect stands for the man who takes any woman, and in the chaos after Creation the beings who wrecked the first society 'had a language like the buzz of an insect.' When the men killed the horseflies, the norms began to rule. So the nurá-mee's threatening drone — with the yuruparí flutes and the stick-rattle, 'the voices' that warn of the dangers of incest — is the repentant Sun exhorting his children to marry out. By Reichel-Dolmatoff's day it was falling silent.

This wooden slat, suspended from a string, is swung rapidly in a circle to make a distinctive noise. It has religious significance as 'the voice of the power of the Sun' through which the Creator exhorts society to observe the rules of exogamy.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos (1971), p. 59.
Object
Wooden slat suspended from a string and swung rapidly in a circle to make a distinctive noise.
Function
Sacred sound treated as 'the voice of the power of the Sun' exhorting the rules of exogamy — the law the Sun Father instituted in repentance for his own primordial incest; grouped with the yuruparí flutes and stick-rattle as 'the voices' that warn of the dangers of incest; already falling into disuse at the time of fieldwork.
Map confidence
medium - Mitú, Vaupés regional anchor for a Desana ethnography; not an instrument findspot or ceremony site.
Source location
p. 59 (PDF p. 84); also pp. 113, 116, 245

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