SA-Z1953-014 - secondary catalog

Tukuna

Brazil; Peru; Colombia - Upper Amazon - South America

Function not recorded

Among the Tukuna of the upper Amazon the bullroarer barely registers. Curt Nimuendaju, who lived among them in 1941 and 1942, found it rare and recorded that some Tukuna said it had reached them as a Neo-Brazilian game, a settler's noisemaker rather than an old instrument; he set it down under the borrowed name brinquedo do diabo, the devil's plaything. That borrowed-toy report is the only thing the record actually says about the Tukuna bullroarer. The tribe's loud, taboo cult sound belongs elsewhere: at the girls' puberty rites it is the two uaricana, a wooden tubular megaphone and a conical bark-trumpet, that voice the demons called noo and are forbidden to women and the uninitiated. Whether the bullroarer might once have worked like those trumpets is raised only as a conditional aside, dependent on the borrowed-game story proving false, and left open. On the evidence the Tukuna bullroarer reads as a late settler's toy, the ritual voice carried by the trumpets beside it.

The bull-roarer (brinquedo do diabo) is rare; some say that it came to the Tukuna as a Neobrazilian game.

Nimuendaju 1952:72, quoted verbatim in Zerries 1953:286

Function

Rare Tukuna bullroarer, reported by informants as a borrowed Neo-Brazilian game (brinquedo do diabo); any ritual use is Zerries' conditional speculation, not attested.

Map confidence

low_medium - regional_anchor: Zerries explicitly makes old ritual connection conditional; source-sufficient only as a caveated occurrence/toy-survival row

Source location

Nimuendaju 1952:72 (bullroarer), 42 (uaricana/noo/Jurupari); cf. Zerries 1953:286

• Initiation rite
• Weather / fertility magic

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