The Bullroarer Atlas

SEA-010 - museum specimen

Narom (?), Lower Baram, Sarawak

Malaysia - Sarawak - ?Narom - Island Southeast Asia - Borneo

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A wooden bull-roarer with a separate carved stick handle, its diamond-shaped blade notched near the cord attachment — shown for the general...
Representative image. A wooden bull-roarer with a separate carved stick handle, its diamond-shaped blade notched near the cord attachment — shown for the general Sarawak/Borneo form, not the object recorded only as "?Narom" in Cambridge's registers. © The Trustees of the British Museum, As1905,-.630 CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: Bullroarer

On Borneo the bullroarer earned its keep in the rice fields. Charles Hose first came upon one in a Kenyah house up the Tinjar River and was told it was swung to scare birds off the padi; when he showed his find to the Narom, a small people of the lower Baram near Claudetown (today's Marudi), they knew the instrument well, used it often, and made him several to order — flat spear-head-shaped blades with two projecting 'ears' at the corded end, whirled from a stick nearly a metre long. The slat here, lashed to its stick and collected by the Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, is catalogued with a cautious question mark: '?Narom'.

Dr. C. Hose first discovered the bull-roarer in Borneo in a Kenyah house up the Tinjar River, Baram district and was told that it was used to scare birds off the padi fields; Dr. Hose bought the unique specimen and subsquently showed it to some Narom, a tribe living near Claudetown, Baram River; the Narom stated that they were well acquainted with the instrument and frequently used it; they made several specimens to order, one of which is that described above.

R. Shelford, 'An Illustrated Catalogue of the Ethnographical Collection of the Sarawak Museum — Part I, Musical Instruments', Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 40 (1904), pp. 58-59.
Object
Cambridge MAA E 1916.142 A: a bullroarer attached to a stick.
Function
Swung to scare birds from the padi (rice) fields — the use Hose was told at the Kenyah discovery, and which the Narom, who knew the instrument well and used it frequently, confirmed (Shelford 1904).
Map confidence
medium - Representative Sarawak anchor; ?Narom locality not independently geocoded.
Source location
MAA E 1916.142 A

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