The Bullroarer Atlas

STEWART1942-004 - primary ethnography

Pahvant Ute

United States - Lower Sevier River and Sevier Lake desert - Kanosh, Utah - North America - Great Basin

Play / practical

Northern Ute bullroarer 60974 with its buckskin line, collected by George A.
Representative — not this record’s object. · Northern Ute bullroarer 60974 with its buckskin line, collected by George A · CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Image source

muyaratinumpö English

Source term: Bull-roarer: whirrer of wood

muyaratinumpö: the Pahvant term for the bull-roarer in Stewart's comparative vocabulary; no literal gloss is given.

John Kanosh — grandson of the famous Chief Kanosh, and at sixty-five a practicing shaman himself — remembered the bull-roarer of the Sevier desert as a plaything: a wooden blade whirled on a handled string, the muyaratinumpö. His Pahvant people ranged the salt lake, the lower Sevier River, and the desert mountains beyond, country not much kinder than the Goshute desert to the north; in his account the whirring blade carried no weather power at all.

Object
Whirrer of wood swung on a string with a wooden handle.
Function
Whirled as a toy; no weather use recorded.
Map confidence
medium - Kanosh, Utah — informant John Kanosh was born there and lived there nearly all his life; the band's range took in Sevier Lake, the lower Sevier River, and the desert mountains west (Stewart pp. 236-237).
Source location
printed p. 291 (els. 2792, 2795, 2797 +; weather els. -); vocabulary p. 352; band pp. 236-237; informants p. 238

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