The Bullroarer Atlas

SA-Z1953-024 - ethnographic attestation

Chacobo

Eastern Bolivia - South America

Play / practical

Chácobo whip-style bull-roarer — small lens blade and its swinging stick, collected on Nordenskiöld's 1913 Bolivia expedition (Etnografiska...
Chácobo whip-style bull-roarer — small lens blade and its swinging stick, collected on Nordenskiöld's 1913 Bolivia expedition (Etnografiska museet 1913.11.0128); the apparatus his Abb. 61 figures. Etnografiska museet, Stockholm (1913.11.0128) CC BY 4.0 Image source

Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer

Among the Chacobo, a Panoan people of northeastern Bolivia, the bull-roarer was a children's plaything. Erland Nordenskiöld recorded it as a toy on his 1908-09 expedition (Indianer und Weisse in Nordostbolivien, 1922, p. 110), and Otto Zerries, surveying the instrument across South America, carried that attestation forward, grouping the Chacobo with their Panoan neighbors the Kashibo and Panobo within an old central-Amazonian cultural stratum in which, he argued, the bull-roarer had decayed into a toy from an earlier cultic use. No ritual function was recorded here.

In Northeastern Bolivia the bull-roarer is used as a children's toy by the Chacobo (Nordenskiöld 1922, p. 110), Yuracaré (l. e. p. 68) and Guarayu (l. e. p. 168).

Zerries 1953, "The Bull-roarer among South American Indians," Revista do Museu Paulista, N.S. VII:288
Function
Bullroarer used as children's toy
Map confidence
medium - regional_anchor: No ritual function extracted
Source location
Nordenskiöld 1922:110 (via Zerries 1953:288, 302)

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