SA-Z1953-024 - ethnographic attestation
Chacobo toy
Eastern Bolivia - South America
Play / practical
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
Page references
Nordenskiöld 1922:110 (via Zerries 1953:288, 302)
- Toy / secular survival