TESSMANN1930-001 - ethnographic attestation
Campa (Asháninka)
Peru - Perené-Tambo drainages, Selva Central montaña (Tessmann's Kampa area) - South America - Upper Amazon
Play / practical
mēromēro German / Kampa name
Source term: Schwirrholz
mēromēro: the Kampa (Campa/Asháninka) name for the bullroarer in Tessmann's games list (1930:92); no lexical gloss given.
Among the Campa — the Asháninka of Peru's Selva Central — the bullroarer lived in the nursery, on both sides of the line between delight and dread. Günter Tessmann, working through his great tribe-by-tribe questionnaire of north-east Peru in the 1920s, met it twice in the same chapter: once in the games list, as mēromēro, alongside balls plaited from maize husks; and once under child-rearing, where small children are frightened with the Schwirrholz 'which is also a toy' — as it roars, they are told the jaguar is coming. Bigger children, he adds, graduate to stinging nettles and the rod. Two decades later the Handbook of South American Indians carried the note into English as a roarer 'said to be the sound of a jaguar,' the form in which the datum has circulated since.
Sind die Kinder klein, so werden sie mit dem Schwirrholz (das auch Spielzeug ist) erschreckt. Dabei sagt man ihnen, der Jaguar käme.
When the children are small they are frightened with the bullroarer (which is also a toy). As it sounds they are told the jaguar is coming.
Tessmann, Die Indianer Nordost-Perus (1930), pp. 99-100
- Function
- Small children are frightened with the bullroarer — told the jaguar is coming as it sounds — and it is also a toy, listed among Campa games as mēromēro (Tessmann 1930:92, 99-100).
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative point in the Perené-Tambo Asháninka (Campa) core, Satipo province; Tessmann does not localize his Kampa material to a settlement.
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 92 (games list, term) and pp. 99-100 (child-frightening); Kampa chapter pp. 83-102