No. SA-Z1953-014
Tukuna brinquedo do cão, the devil's plaything
Brazil; Peru; Colombia · Upper Amazon · South America
Play / practical
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
brinquedo do cão = 'the dog's plaything' (Portuguese; cão is the everyday Brazilian euphemism for the Devil), the name Nimuendajú records for the Tukuna bullroarer (1952:72, glossary p. 159); uaricana = paired Tukuna voice-disguising trumpets (a wooden tubular megaphone and a conical bark-trumpet); ṅɔɔ' = the demons whose voices the uaricana carry at the girls' puberty rites (Nimuendajú 1952:74, 77, 80).
Among the Tukuna of the upper Amazon the bullroarer barely registers. Curt Nimuendajú, who lived among them in 1941 and 1942, found it rare, a children's amusement beside the spinning top and the buzzer disk, and heard some Tukuna say it had reached them as a Neo-Brazilian game; he set it down under its Portuguese name, brinquedo do cão, the devil's plaything. The tribe's loud, taboo cult sound belongs elsewhere: at the girls' puberty rites the two uaricana, a wooden tubular megaphone and a conical bark-trumpet, carry the voices of the demons, ṅɔɔ', and are forbidden to women and the uninitiated. Yet the roarer pictured here, carried out of the Solimões by Nimuendajú himself in 1929, was sounded in the mask dance of that same feast.
The bull-roarer (brinquedo do cão) is rare; some say that it came to the Tukuna as a Neobrazilian game.
Nimuendaju 1952:72, quoted verbatim in Zerries 1953:286
Particulars
- Function
- Rare, and said by some Tukuna to have come to them as a Neo-Brazilian game.
Source
Curt Nimuendajú, The Tukuna, ed. R. H. Lowie, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), pp. 42, 72, 74, 77, 80, 159; Otto Zerries, "The Bull-roarer among South American Indians," Revista do Museu Paulista n.s. 7 (1953), p. 286