WISDOM1940-001 - ethnographic attestation
Chortí Maya
Chiquimula, eastern Guatemala highlands - Mesoamerica - Central America
Play / practical
Source term: bull-roarer
Charles Wisdom spent 1932 and 1933 among the Chorti of Jocotan and Olopa, in the dry eastern hills of Guatemala, and when he came to write down what Chorti children played with he made a short list: dolls, bows and arrows, tops, accordions, bull-roarers, and miniature versions of adult things. The roarer he describes is plain — a light piece of wood on the end of an agave cord four or five feet long — and he attached one careful qualification to it. The Chorti knew the thing, he wrote, but they seldom made it. That is a sentence about a moment rather than a custom: the object still present, still nameable, and already passing out of the hands that would have made it.
The bull-roarer, which consists of a light piece of wood attached to the end of an agave cord, four or five feet long, is known to the Indians, but they seldom make it.
Wisdom, The Chorti Indians of Guatemala (1940), p. 297
- Object
- A light piece of wood attached to the end of an agave cord four or five feet long. Wisdom gives no dimensions and no shape beyond "a light piece of wood".
- Function
- A children's toy, listed with dolls, bows and arrows, tops, accordions and miniature objects. Wisdom adds that the Chortí know it but seldom make it — the object is present in the culture and going out of use, with no ritual role recorded.
- Map confidence
- high - Jocotan, Chiquimula — the principal municipio of Wisdom's fieldwork area (Jocotan and Olopa)
- Source location
Page references
pp. 296-297 (toy list p. 296; the bull-roarer described p. 297); indexed in the book's own index as "Bull-roarer, 296-97"
- Toy / secular survival