ZERRIES1964-001 - primary ethnography
Waika (Yanoama; today’s Yanomami)
Venezuela - Upper Orinoco - Mahekodotedi (El Platanal) - South America
Play / practical
alabaco German
Source term: Schwirrholz
alabaco = the Waika name for the Mahekodotedi bullroarer; Zerries gives no translation.
The Waika of the upper Orinoco — the people the world now knows as the Yanomami — kept no musical instruments at all, Otto Zerries reported after a year and a half among them. He found one exception. At Mahekodotedi, children whirled the alabaco, an oval blade a forearm long, painted with geometric designs in onoto, the red annatto pigment, its cord tied through a hole or to a little peg. Where the bullroarer stars in the boys’ initiations of so many other peoples, here it had sunk wholly into play — an uncommon toy in a single settlement, unknown, Zerries adds, among every other Yanoama group.
kennen die Waika — in diesem Falle ein echtes Randvolk — keinerlei Musik-Instrumente, jedoch ist bei den Leuten von Mahekodo-tedi das Schwirrholz, „alabaco“ mit Namen, ein nicht sehr häufiges Spielzeug
The Waika know no musical instruments whatsoever; yet among the people of Mahekodotedi there is the bullroarer, alabaco by name, a not very common toy.
Otto Zerries, Waika (1964), p. 202.
- Object
- Elongated-oval wooden blade, 32 by 4 cm, painted with simple geometric designs in onoto; the whirling cord is fixed either through a perforation or to a small peg.
- Function
- A children’s toy, and an uncommon one. Zerries records that among the Waika the bullroarer had sunk wholly into the profane, against its initiation role among many other peoples.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Zerries’s historical position for Mahekodotedi / El Platanal: 64°55′ W, 2°25′ N; a 1954–55 location, not a current-village claim.
- Source location
- p. 202 (PDF p. 203)
- Toy / secular survival