SEA-012 - museum specimen
Baling, the whirling fishing-rod rig
Thailand - Pattani, lower Siam (Malay coast) - Southeast Asia - Mainland
Play / practical
baling / berbaling
Source term: baling
Malay baling / berbaling, 'to whirl, revolve' — the name the expedition recorded at both Pattani and Jalor.
In the market town of Pattani, on the Malay coast of lower Siam, the naturalists Nelson Annandale and Herbert Robinson picked up a whirling rig built like a fishing rod: a sword-shaped blade barely a hand long, corded to a stick that runs past a metre. The Malay name they recorded, baling or berbaling, is the word for whirling round. Who swung it in Pattani, and for what, went unrecorded — inland at Jalor the same expedition found its small twin driving elephants out of the plantations.
- Object
- PRM 1902.88.99: a wooden blade of 'sword shape', 256 x 25 mm, on a cord tied to a 1.2 m stick — the complete rig, collected 1901-02.
- Function
- A Malay child's toy, formerly swung to scare elephants out of the plantations — the collectors' own account of the Patani-States whizzing-stick baling; the wind-and-rain-calling belief they recorded belongs to the propeller-windmill baling, a different device.
- Source
- Pitt Rivers Museum 1902.88.99, Pattani, collected by N. Annandale & H. C. Robinson (purchased 1902); Annandale & Robinson, Fasciculi Malayenses, Anthropology (expedition context)
- Source location
- PRM 1902.88.99
- Source confidence
- high Pattani town, the museum's recorded collection place.
- Toy / secular survival