The Bullroarer Atlas

SEA-003 - museum specimen

Kenyah / Klemantan

Malaysia - Sarawak - Baram River District - Southeast Asia - Borneo

Weather / fertility magic

Kenyah (Klemantan) child's bull-roarer, Baram River, Sarawak (Borneo) — British Museum, As1905,-.629.
Kenyah (Klemantan) child's bull-roarer, Baram River, Sarawak (Borneo) — British Museum, As1905,-.629. © The Trustees of the British Museum, As1905,-.629 CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

wat jawat English

Source term: bullroarer

"wat jawat" — the local name recorded for the object in the British Museum register; the term does not appear in Hose and McDougall's published account.

Charles Hose, an officer in the Brooke administration of Sarawak, collected this small wooden bullroarer on the Baram River; it entered the British Museum in 1905, when the museum acquired his Borneo collection of some three thousand objects, and it is recorded as a child's toy of the Kenyah and Klemantan. In their account of Borneo, Hose and his collaborator William McDougall describe the instrument only as a plaything of boys and tie it to the rice clearings: when jungle is felled for padi a few trees are left standing on high ground so as not to offend the local Toh, the spirits vaguely supposed to use the trees as resting-places, and on a pole lashed across such a trunk a bullroarer is sometimes hung "to dangle and flicker in the breeze." That is a different thing from the elaborate rig with which the same fields were guarded against the rice-sparrow: upright bamboos strung together with rattans, tugged from a watch-hut by a woman or child to set hung articles flapping and clattering. Of the bullroarer itself, Hose and McDougall noted that they were not aware it was put to any other use by any of the tribes.

a "bull-roarer," which is used by boys as a toy, is sometimes hung upon such a cross-piece to dangle and flicker in the breeze.

Hose & McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (1912), vol. II
Object
A small wooden bullroarer on a string, recorded as a Kenyah and Klemantan child's toy.
Function
Children use plus men swinging in rice fields to scare avian spirits from ripening rice
Map confidence
high - Baram River District source locality not British Museum
Source location
British Museum As1905,-.630 (Kenyah, Baram; wat jawat)

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