SEA-011 - lexical attestation
Sagada (Northern Kankanay / Lepanto-Bontok Igorot)
Philippines - Sagada, western Mountain Province, Cordillera Central, northern Luzon (Northern Kankanay - former Lepanto territory) - Southeast Asia
Play / practical
bawengweng Sagada Igorot (Northern Kankanay)
bawengweng (Sagada Igorot / Northern Kankanay): the bull-roarer; glossed as a wooden toy whirled on the end of a string to make a noise.
In the Cordillera highlands of northern Luzon, the Sagada Igorot — the northernmost of the Northern Kankanay (Lepanto-Bontok) — gave the name bawengweng to a bull-roarer: in the words of William Henry Scott's 1957 Sagada vocabulary, relayed in E. Arsenio Manuel's 1976 inventory of Philippine instruments, "a wooden toy on the end of a string swung around to make a noise." It is recorded among the village's sound-making idiophones as a child's plaything, with no ceremonial role attached. In these mountains, where so much of the bull-roarer's older mystery has fallen away, the whirled slat survives chiefly as a noise-maker in the hands of children.
bawengweng, a wooden toy on the end of a string swung around to make a noise, a bull-roarer
E. Arsenio Manuel, "Toward an Inventory of Philippine Musical Instruments," Asian Studies 14, no. 1 (1976): 20 (after Scott 1957).
- Object
- A flat wooden slat tied to the end of a string and whirled to make a roaring or humming noise.
- Function
- A children's whirled wooden toy that produces a roaring/humming sound; no ritual use recorded.
- Map confidence
- high - Sagada town centre, the named locality and core of Northern Kankanay (Sagada) territory in western Mountain Province
- Source location
Page references
pp. 20-21 (inventory, section "8. Sagada (Lepanto-Bontok)"); p. 60 (glossary entry "BAWENGWENG, Sag., bull roarer")
- Toy / secular survival