The Bullroarer Atlas

SA-Z1953-022 - ethnographic attestation

Kampa

Northeastern Peru - Montana - South America

Play / practical

A dark bull-roarer with a broad pale band across its center, the wound cord still knotted through the neck hole, from the Ethnologisches...
Representative image. A dark bull-roarer with a broad pale band across its center, the wound cord still knotted through the neck hole, from the Ethnologisches Museum's Nahukuá holdings; not the specific Kampa object or culture documented here. Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (V B 2505); photo: Lars Malareck CC BY-NC-SA Image source

mēromēro Kampa (Asháninka; Arawakan), northeastern Peru / Montaña

Source term: mēromēro (Zerries: "mero mero")

Among the Kampa of the eastern Peruvian montaña, the bullroarer — called mēromēro — was a toy of half-grown children and a means of disciplining smaller ones. Adults would whirl it and warn the naughty child, that the jaguar was coming — "der Jaguar käme." Günter Tessmann, who recorded the device in his 1930 survey of northeastern Peru's Indians, noted the same jaguar threat among neighboring Tshamikuro and Ikito, where masks were used to frighten children as well. Otto Zerries read the bullroarer here as a "survival": with jaguar-shaped bush-demons believed to mislead travelers and steal children, and with masks and bullroarers paired elsewhere in the region, he inferred an older cult of initiation in which the instrument had voiced such spirits. That deeper ritual reading is his inference; what Tessmann documented directly is a child's noisemaker and a bogey's voice.

Sind die Kinder klein, so werden sie mit dem Schwirrholz (das auch Spielzeug ist) erschreckt. Dabei sagt man ihnen, der Jaguar käme.

When the children are small, they are frightened with the bullroarer (which is also a toy). As it sounds, they are told the jaguar is coming.

Tessmann 1930:99-100 (Kampa, rubric 71)
Function
Toy and child-frightening use; warning that jaguar will come; Zerries links to older bush-spirit/initiation survival
Map confidence
medium - regional_anchor: Older cultic reading is Zerries inference; safe use is toy-decay with jaguar/bogy voice
Source location
Tessmann 1930:92, 99-100 (via Zerries 1953:287,296; corroborated Izikowitz 1935:212-213)

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