SEA-002 - museum specimen
Dyak Hantu-Hantuan Southwest Kalimantan bullroarer
Indonesia - Southwest Kalimantan - Borneo - Southeast Asia
Function not recorded
hantu-hantuan English
Source term: Bull-Roarer Hantu-Hantuan
hantu-hantuan — Malay/Indonesian, a reduplicated form of hantu ("ghost, spirit"), roughly "the spirit thing" or "spirit-like"; the name attached to the object in the museum record.
Etymology. Reduplicated `hantu` form; current sources treat it as a spirit/ghost-derived label attached to the object. (high confidence)
A bullroarer collected among the Dyak of southwestern Kalimantan and catalogued by the Smithsonian under the name hantu-hantuan, a reduplication of the Malay word hantu, ghost or spirit — roughly "the spirit thing." It was one of more than seventeen hundred Bornean objects gathered by the American naturalist William Louis Abbott, mostly between 1905 and 1909, working from his schooner the Terrapin. The museum record names the instrument but not its use, and the great early ethnography of the island, Hose and McDougall's Pagan Tribes of Borneo (1912), knew the Bornean bull-roarer as a boys' toy with a single further office: when jungle was cleared for padi, a few trees were spared for the Toh, the spirits of the place, and a bull-roarer was sometimes hung on a cross-piece lashed to such a tree "to dangle and flicker in the breeze." Of any other use, the authors wrote, they were not aware.
- Function
- Smithsonian object evidence from Southwest Kalimantan with no use stated
- Map confidence
- high - Southwest Kalimantan source place not Smithsonian location
- Source location
- API search 2026-05-31