SA-Z1953-025 - secondary catalog
Itonama bullroarer
Eastern Bolivia - South America
Function not recorded
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
Among the Itonama of the eastern Bolivian lowlands, the bullroarer is recorded only as a bare fact of existence. Erland Nordenskiöld noted the instrument in their territory but wrote nothing of what it was for, and Otto Zerries, surveying South American bullroarers decades later, could add no more: he placed the Itonama on his distribution map while marking plainly that the instrument's meaning there went unreported. Among neighboring northeastern Bolivian peoples the bullroarer turns up as a children's toy — a plaything for the Chacobo, Yuracaré, and Guarayu, and known to the Chimane as kakabadje — but for the Itonama even that much is unknown.
The bull-roarer exists also among the Itonama, but Nordenskiõld (1919, p. 162) has said nothing about its meaning.
Zerries 1953:288 (The Bull-roarer among South American Indians)
- Object
- Bullroarer; not described.
- Map confidence
- medium - Regional anchor for the named people; not a findspot.
- Source location
Page references
288; 302