SAMER-002 - secondary catalog
Cubeo (Kobeua / Kubeo)
Colombia - Upper Vaupés - Cuduiarí and Querarí rivers - South America - Northwest Amazonia
Restricted
Among the Cubeo of the upper Vaupés — the Kobéua whom Theodor Koch-Grünberg lived with on the Cuduiarí in 1904 — a carved, painted, fish-shaped piece of wood is figured in his Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern (1909-10) as figure 90. Koch-Grünberg recorded it as a dance-ornament; it is Alfred Métraux who, reading the same figure, classed it among the South American bull-roarers, noting that fish-figures of this form from the Bakairi and Kobeua “sont employés comme ornement de danse et comme 'diables' (bull-roarer).” Koch-Grünberg himself watched the Kobéua dance with painted wooden fish-figures carried between paired dancers on light Cecropia-wood rods, and he sat through the men's secret Yurupary rites, where the whirled and blown instruments stood for demons that women were forbidden not only to see but even to know existed; even to him the men would say only that the instruments were spirits. The same masked impersonations of animal and demon spirits filled the Cubeo death festival, the mourning ceremony later documented as the Óyne. And the whirled instrument was no stranger on this river: a generation later Irving Goldman recorded that a Cubeo shaman kept a stone bull-roarer, whirled so that its distant victim suffered as if struck with a machete.
„Es sind Dämonen (Yurupary) mit verschiedenen Namen und verschiedenen Stimmen.“
"It is demons (Yurupary) with various names and various voices."
Koch-Grünberg, Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern (1921 ed.):221
- Object
- Carved-wood, fish-shaped bull-roarer used as a dance ornament.
- Function
- Whirled as a spirit-voice ('diable') and worn as ornament in masked mourning dances.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- Koch-Grünberg 1909-10, fig. 90 (cited via Métraux 1928 p.265)
- Spirit voice
- Death and rebirth
- Forbidden to women