Additional studies of the arts, crafts, and customs of the Guiana Indians : with special reference to those of Southern British Guiana / by Walter E. Roth.

  • Roth, Walter E. (Walter Edmund), 1861-1933.
Date:
1929
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Additional studies of the arts, crafts, and customs of the Guiana Indians : with special reference to those of Southern British Guiana / by Walter E. Roth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/178 (page 4)
    [bull. 91 72. At end of section add: Sipo [sippi, etc.] is said to be the Brazilian word for any bush rope. Ropes for nets and hammocks are manufactured from the fiber underneath the bark of the white mangrove. (HRT, 78.) 75. At end of section add: Among the Waiwai, on my recent trip, I saw fruit shells of fairly large size, up to seven-eighths inch greatest diameter, attached along the lower border of the women’s aprons, etc., the tinkling of which was due not only to the one shell knocking against its neighbors, but also to artificial “clappers” introduced through a slit along the rounded edge. Whether the slit was a natural one or not I can not say, but at any rate it must have been through its means, before the hardening of the shell took place, that the clapper or clappers in the A 1 i i ■J (Sec. 34) form of beads, gravel, stone chips, etc., were introduced. As a matter of fact, each fruit shell was the nearest approach imaginable to a “natural” form of a European child’s folly-bell, and all the more remarkable in that for the first time, some 12 years ago, I had distributed many dozens of such folly-bells as trade among then- neighbors (the Wapishana, and so through them), the Taruma. Two of the Waiwai girls were each wearing such a brummagem folly-bell. An illustration of such a clapper shell is given by De Goeje. (GOE, pi. i, fig. 23.) 76. At end of section add: Where the aperture of the bead is too small for even the fine korowa thread to pass, the latter is attached by means of a very fine blob of karamanni wax to an akuri hair which easily gets through.