SA-Z1953-016 - secondary catalog
Baniwa
Brazil; Colombia; Venezuela - Northwestern Brazil - Rio Negro - South America
Function not recorded
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz (German): bullroarer. Jurupari / Yuruparí (regional vernacular) = Kuwai (Baniwa): the male-initiation cult whose sacred voice is carried by paxiuba-palm flutes and trumpets, forbidden to the sight of women. Botuto: a large earthenware ritual trumpet of the Orinoco (a distinct instrument, not a bullroarer).
Only one thing is firmly documented about the Baniwa bullroarer: that they had one. Izikowitz logged it in his 1935 survey of South American sound instruments with no comment on its use, and that bare entry is all the record offers. The upper Rio Negro is the heartland of the Kuwai or Jurupari (Yuruparí) cult, in which a sacred voice is barred from women and revealed only to initiated men, and there the voice belongs above all to the great paxiuba-palm flutes and trumpets, said to be the body of a slain creator-child. The whirled slat was no stranger to that ensemble: across the Vaupés the Tukanoan Desana swung a bull-roarer they called the horsefly as one of the voices of the Sun Father beside the yuruparí flutes. Among the Arawakan Baniwa, though, no ethnographer early or modern has caught it in the cult. In the Tatuyo telling those instruments are themselves born of a swallowing: initiate boys who broke a food taboo are devoured by the anaconda Pohé-piné, who is made to vomit up their bones and is burned, and from his ashes grows the palm from which the sacred instruments are cut — a Vaupés myth catalogued by Yuri Berezkin. Otto Zerries, cataloguing the bullroarer across the continent, wanted to tie the Baniwa specimen to that cult and could not: the trail he inherited from Loeb, Briffault, and Coudreau, claiming the bullroarer itself was Jurupari's voice and forbidden to women on pain of death, he was unable to confirm in any primary source, and his own guess that the blade "perhaps" carried the spirit voice here he flagged as conjecture. So the Baniwa bullroarer stands as an attested object whose ritual meaning, if it had one, went unrecorded.
Unfortunately, I could not find out any connection between the bull-roarer and the cult of the so-called Jurupari in northwestern Brazil, neither in Coudreau nor anywhere else in the literature dealing with the subject.
Otto Zerries, The Bull-roarer among South American Indians (1953), p. 285
- Function
- Bullroarer occurrence reported; possible relation to Jurupari/sacred-flute spirit-voice complex but Zerries could not verify Loeb-Briffault trail
- Map confidence
- low_medium - regional_anchor: Jurupari-bullroarer connection remains source-gated; Baniwa occurrence alone is source-sufficient
- Source location
- Zerries 1953, pp. 285-286 (Baniwa/Jurupari discussion), 294-295 (conjectural flute/bullroarer link); Izikowitz 1935, p. 209; Loeb 1929, p. 281 (n. 104)
- Initiation rite
- Weather / fertility magic