The Bullroarer Atlas

SA-Z1953-004 - ethnographic attestation

Apinaye

Eastern Brazil - South America

Play / practical

Two Apinayé bull-roarers mounted on their cord-sticks — one a plain dark lens-shaped blade, the other a straight strip banded in zigzag —...
Two Apinayé bull-roarers mounted on their cord-sticks — one a plain dark lens-shaped blade, the other a straight strip banded in zigzag — flanking the veve thread-cross of concentric diamonds on its own stick; the exact objects and mounting documented here (Nimuendajú 1939, fig. 25). Curt Nimuendajú, The Apinayé (1939), fig. 25 Public domain Image source
Apinaye bullroarer GM-31.40.266 as a complete handstick, cord, and narrow wooden blade.
Apinaye bullroarer GM-31.40.266 as a complete handstick, cord, and narrow wooden blade. Vera Primavera in Aguirre-Fernandez et al. 2021, fig. 1g, after Izikowitz 1935 (GM-31.40.266); cropped from the published figure CC BY 4.0 Image source

me-galo German / English extraction

Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer

me-galo: the Apinaye word for the soul, ghost, shadow, and image of a dead person, also applied to the bull-roarer.

Etymology. me-galo, the name of the Apinaye toy bullroarer, is their word for the soul, ghost, shadow, and image of a dead person. (high confidence)

Among the Apinayé, the bull-roarer had slipped into the toy basket — but its name, me-galo, is the one word for soul, ghost, shadow, and the image of the dead. The Apinayé dead linger at cemeteries and old village sites until a second death turns them into animals, tree stumps, or termite hills. Nimuendajú never explains why the whirring toy carries the ghost-word; among the neighbouring Sherente, whose usage he says it recalls, the answer is explicit — their bullroarer is 'the howling of Hieparo-wawe,' lord of the will-o'-the-wisps, whirled in the woods to make the demon appear. In the Apinayé fire myth, an ogre named for the me-galo tries to pass himself off as a lost boy's father before wrestling him into his carrying-basket.

Like the Eastern Timbira, the Apinaye call the soul, ghost, shadow, and image by a common term, me-galo; the Apinaye further apply the word to the bull-roarer, which recalls Serente usage.

Nimuendajú, The Apinayé (1939), p. 140
Function
Toy bullroarer named me-galo meaning soul; ghost; shadow
Map confidence
high - regional_anchor: Representative Apinaye/Tocantins coordinate; supports toy-decay and soul-name more than live rite
Source location
109-110 (Childhood/toys; bull-roarers in fig. 25); 140 (Animism); 158 (Megalo-kamdu're in the fire myth)

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