SA-Z1953-029 - ethnographic attestation
Chimane toy
Eastern Bolivia - South America
Play / practical
kakabadje German / English extraction
Source term: Schwirrgerät / Schwirrholz / bullroarer
kakabadje — Chimane (Tsimane') name for the bullroarer, recorded by Wegner as a children's toy.
Among the Chimane of the Bolivian Mojos lowlands the bullroarer survived only as a children's plaything, called kakabadje. The notice traces to the German anatomist Richard N. Wegner, who passed through Bolivia on the expedition he wrote up as Zum Sonnentor durch altes Indianerland; on page 233 he records the name and the toy use, and nothing more about the object. Otto Zerries, compiling his South American bullroarer survey in 1953, took the Chimane entry from Wegner and grouped them with the neighbouring Chacobo, Yuracare and Guarayu, for whom the whirled wood had likewise dwindled to a toy with no recorded ritual function.
The Chimane still know it as a toy and call it Kakabadje.
Zerries 1953:288 (The Bull-roarer among South American Indians), citing Wegner p.233
- Function
- Bullroarer still known as toy and called Kakabadje
- Map confidence
- medium - regional_anchor: No live ritual function extracted
- Source location
Page references
Wegner 1936:233; reported in Zerries 1953:288
- Toy / secular survival