SCHMELTZ1896-001 - related instrument
Java
Indonesia - Java - Southeast Asia
Play / practical
Kitiran German
Source term: Kitiran / Schwirrholz
Kitiran: a Javanese term for a spinning or whirling toy; here applied to a split-bamboo noise-maker swung on a cord that Schmeltz treated as a child's bullroarer.
Etymology. Schmeltz treats `kitiran` as a Javanese spinning or whirling toy term applied to a bullroarer-like device. (medium confidence)
Surveying bullroarers worldwide in 1896, the ethnographer J. D. E. Schmeltz found only two in the whole Malay Archipelago: a Toba-Batak toy from Sumatra, and a Javanese children's plaything called the kitiran. He worked from an object in the Ethnographical Museum at Leiden, no. 625/2: a thin bamboo stick split halfway down its length, the split halves faced with brown paper cut to a truncated pyramid and marked with two red wavy lines, a square of tin slid onto the rest and tied by a thread to a thicker, longer piece of bamboo. The handling, Schmeltz wrote, was the same as a Schwirrholz, and the effect it produced agreed with one. Nothing in his account ties it to ritual; he files it as a toy and illustrates it on his plate as figure 24.
Die Behandlung ist die gleiche wie beim Schwirrholz und auch die erzielte Wirkung stimmt mit der desselben überein.
The handling is the same as with the bullroarer, and the effect produced agrees with it as well.
Schmeltz 1896:103 (Das Schwirrholz. Versuch einer Monographie)
- Object
- Java museum object no. 625/2: split bamboo with paper and tin, tied by cord to a larger bamboo handle; Schmeltz says its handling is the same as a Schwirrholz and the achieved effect agrees with it.
- Function
- Child toy with source-explicit bullroarer handling and sound effect.
- Map confidence
- medium - Java island regional anchor; source gives Java and a Leiden museum object number, not a collection village or use locality
- Source location
- Schmeltz 1896 pp. 102-103; plate fig. 24
- Toy / secular survival