Ipurina fish-shaped bullroarer

yueneru

Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer

yueneru = the Ipurina name Ehrenreich recorded for the bullroarer; Kamutschi / Kamatschi = the Ipurina spirit-beings (whose name Ehrenreich linked to kamu, "sun," in Arawakan tongues) and the festival named for them, in which their voices issue from bark trumpets and reed flutes.

Among the Ipurina (Apurinã) of the Purus River, Paul Ehrenreich acquired a fish-shaped bullroarer the people called yueneru; of what they did with it, he wrote plainly, he could find out nothing. Fish-figures cut from bark were common in the region, and the shape points to the staple food of the river rather than to any cult — which is as far as the evidence runs for the instrument itself. The drama Ehrenreich did record belongs instead to the great Kamutschi festival, where ghostly spirits said to be feathered or fine-haired live inside spiral-bark trumpets and reed flutes that a shaman fetches from a hidden lagoon: the men circle the house blowing with all their strength while the women, for whom the mere sight of the instruments means death, flee into the huts and douse every fire. But it is the trumpets and flutes the women must not see, not the bullroarer; whether the yueneru had any part in the dance, Zerries offers only as a guess.

Am Purus feiern es die Ipurina fast in derselben Weise, wie ihre nördlichen Brüder am Orinoco. Nur wird hier die Existenz zahlreicher Kamutschi angenommen, gespenstischer Wesen, angeblich mit Federn oder feinem Haar bedeckt, die allen Uneingeweihten, auch den Männern, verderblich sind. Doch werden letztere vorkommendenfalls von den Zauberern gerettet, während den Weibern ihr Anblick sicheren Tod bringt.

On the Purus the Ipurina celebrate it almost in the same way as their northern brothers on the Orinoco. Only here the existence of numerous Kamutschi is assumed — ghostly beings, allegedly covered with feathers or fine hair, who are deadly to all the uninitiated, even to the men. The men, however, are saved in such cases by the sorcerers, while to the women the very sight of them brings certain death.

Ehrenreich 1891, quoted in Zerries 1953:284

Particulars

Object

A bullroarer whose blade is cut to the outline of a fish.

Function

Fish-shaped bullroarer acquired by Ehrenreich; employment unknown; possible connection to sacred flute dance where women flee and spirits are in instruments