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Updates an opinions
in chonological order
1974 - 1996
The first time my wife and I noticed the tiger bells was during our stay in the Philippines (1973 - 1975). In 1975 we returned to Europe overland and visited several countries. In Thailand we found bells with the face-design but of a different type. On the Tibetan Refugee market in New Delhi we found bells of the same type and with the same design as we had seen in Thailand. Our last stop was in Paris, France, where we visited the Musée de l'Homme. There I found four bells on a shaman's dress from the Tungus in North East Siberia. These bells were identical to the bells we had seen in the Philippines. I decided to try find out the history of these bells.
Back home I corresponded with several museums in Europa and received several interesting reactions such as Ms. Inger Wulffs' report of a tiger bell from Kelantan. In 1976 I had the chance to work for six months in the Ethnological Museum in Leyden. This gave me access to the depots and the library. That produced much new material: about 40 tiger bells, mostly from Indonesia, some on objects such as baby carriers, and several books with illustrations and sometimes a description of the bells.
Information came in slowly. However it became more and more clear that the history of the tiger bells was a story worth investigating. In 1980 I had the chance to work in Indonesia for a year. I accepted the job, also because this gave me the chance to be in a region where I could continue the search for the tiger bells. My employer (an engineering consultancy firm) had employees and projects all over the world. Whenever I heard of a collegue going to an interesting place or country I gave instructons and pictures of tiger bells. That first one year became in total 10 years and many reports were added. In 1991 we went back to the Netherlands. During the early '90s the internet became more and more important. It also became easier to create a website and to have your own domain. In 1996 I opened my first version of the website on the tiger bells.
Now follow in chronological order the most important opinions and events that contributed to the story of the tiger bells. Please follow the links in the text but, once you have read the case description, do not forget to click on the back-arrow to come back to this page.
Please note that all cases reported during the period 1975 - 1996 (that is befòre the site was published on the internet) are also presented in the individual Reports.
January 1996
Yousef Lasi asks in what region of Pakistan tiger bells occur. He will try to find out if there is a link between the tiger bells and the Hazara, an ethnic group in Northwest Pakistan that arrived there in the 13th to 15th century, coming from Mongolia.
Mr. Lasi did not follow this up but several years later the role of the Hazara people did become clear.
...the frequencies of these tiger bells does not come as such a shock to me. Years ago, I hypothesized the existence of a single cultural group spanning much of Europe and Asia. Linguistic and cultural similarities can be seen in several fragment groups still surviving on both continents. (...) I can still remember a few of these groups: Turkic Mongolian, Tungusic, Finnic, Hungarian. Traces also exist in Korea and throughout Indonesia...
February 1996
...my personal belief is that certain "Tribes" have certain "Totem" animals which are drawn to the community through the Shamans, or Medicine People.
Regarding the patchy distribution of the bells, you suggested that such data might be useful for tracing pattertns of ethnic history and migration. Let me remind you of an often-underestimated factor in cultural diversity: the need/desire of people to distinguish their group from neighboring groups. We see it very clearly within our own culture, as each subculture develops its' own identity- badges. Often they are relatively trivial: clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, speech patterns or dialects, for example. But this same human characteristic, when applied to traditional cultures, can have far-reaching, profound influence on cultural evolution. I would suggest that an understanding of the patchy distribution of tiger bells could best be understood, at least at the local level, with a style or fashion-based analysis.
That is, we don't wear tiger bells because they wear tiger bells.
My comment (in short): This does not answer the questions on the origin. Why would (in SE Mindanao) a Bagobo want to indicate that he feels related to e.g. a Mansaka and not to a Tagabili? Also, certain musical practices occur with the people with the tiger bell and not with others (e.g. the set of hanging gongs).
March 1996
That is interesting; the presence of tiger bells correlates with a particular type of gong playing. What other correlations can be found? How about dance styles? If tiger bells were used to accent a particular kind of dance, that may relate to larger patterns of religion and ritual.
Reacting on the considerable age of the type A bells (possibly around 700 years): It is quite possible that major movements of peoples have taken place within the last few centuries. I hadn't really thought about how old these bells are; if they have been in the possesion of the same people for 700 years, then they could provide a useful migration-tracer.
Boas had in his collection hundreds of ivory needlecases created by Eskimo craftspeople. These were not mass-produced, identical artifacts, but showed many different forms. He (Boas) writes:
The conclusion which I draw from a comparison of the types of needlecases here represented is that the flanged needlecase represents an old conventional style, which is ever present in the mind of the Eskimo artist who sets about to carve a needlecase. The various parts of the flanged needlecase excite his imagination; and a geometrical element here or there is developed by him, in accordance with the general tendencies of Eskimo art, into the representations of whole animals or of parts of animals.... [If] we are to form an acceptable theory of the origin of decorative designs, it seems a safer method to form our judgement based on examples the history of which can be traced with a fair degree of certainty, rather than on speculations in regard to the origin of remote forms for the development of which no data are available. [Boas 1908]
In other words, culture plays a big role in how people are going to take a basic object such as a tigerbell and turn it into something else. Or to even decide to use it at all! (Suppose people think that tigers are evil -- would they want to have objects representing their fear around?) The best way to find out why people have or don't have tiger bells is simply to do a little good ethnography, as the original poster sought in the first place. This data will always beat out the unsound and usually untestable speculations of certain reductionists.
August 1996
January 1997
October 1997
Elisabeth den Otter reports a tiger bell, type A, collected during her trip in Burma.
April 2005
After eight years of relative silence we received three new reports on tiger bells. Two reports by Annemarieke Koch, from Bhutan, in October 2004 and from Syria in April 2005, and one report in February 2005 by Dolf Heubers with three tiger bells from Afghanistan. Later he donated the bells to me.
July 2005
After his trip (in June - July '05) to the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan Marcel v.d. Burg reports:
...I have received contradicting information and it is difficult to make any sense of it. Almost everywhere bringing up the subject has led to great surprise. No one had ever paid any attention to the bells. People were however very willing to think and remember but this did not always lead to consistent answers..
Read the rest of his report on the page on Afghanistan.
March 2006
Hans Brandeis (ethnomusicologist in Berlin) sent several photographs of two bells he has received from a relative from Mindoro (see the page on the Philippines). He also sent a picture of a horse or yak belt from India, in the Ethnography Museum in Vienna, see the page on India.
December 2006
Christine de Jong reported that several years ago she bought three small tiger bells in a store specialising in products from China, somewhere in Amsterdam.
In the Damstraat in Amsterdam we noticed an ethnic and curio shop that uses a tiger bell as a door bell.
The entrance of an ethno- and curioshop
in the Damstraat, Amsterdam
February 2008
Amy Amalzamar reported a sale on E-bay of a tiger bell from China, dating from the Kuang Hsu period (19th century). The bell has a very peculiar design which is very different from other tiger bells.
March 2008
In a paper titled 'Malang, Sufis, and Mystics', the author dr. Muhammad Humayun Sidky describes the arrival of shamanism in Afghanistan. Could there be a connection between the presence of tiger bells in the area and the Hazara people, and the arrival of shamanism? I'm trying to contact the author to hear his opinion on this (until now, 2013, without success).
Arnoud ten Haaft organises and guides trekking and camping trips to remote areas in North-Eastern Asia. He reports that he has seen several tiger bells attached to shaman costumes in the National Museum in Kyzyl, capital of Tuva. Now he is organising a trip to Mongolia this summer. He has promised to keep his eyes peeled for tiger bells and report any interesting facts he finds. (November 2010: no reports received)
July 2008
August 2008
January 2009
January 2010
May 2010
October 2010
While there were several reports and developments since March 2008 it slowly became clear that the number of reactions that reached us through the contact page of the website had come to a stand still. It turned out that the software used to protect the site from spam had not only blocked the spam but also stopped all other messages. Luckily a directory could be found where copies of the messages could be salvaged, be it without the appendices. We tried to contact everyone who had sent a message. Among the messages were several of importance to the story of the tiger bells. Among them:
Marco Hadjidakis reported in March 2009 that he has several tiger bells and a small table or stool with a toli (a bronze disk) and several tiger bells, from a Mongolian (or Siberian) shaman.
In March 2010 Tom Ulbrich and Bui Kim Dinh from Vietnam reported a tiger bell from Northern Vietnam. The bell's age was estimated at about 1000 years by an antique dealer and expert. Unfortunately the contact could not be re-established.
November 2010
In the television program Vrije geluiden (Free sounds) there was a performance by Hanggai, a group from China, playing music in fusion style, based on traditional music from Mongolia and contemporary pop music. The drum set featured, together with the usual contemporary cymbals and drums, a bundle of metal bells, clearly tiger bells.
The drummer behind his drum set
One of the bundles of tiger bells
Screen shots: courtesy VPRO 'Vrije geluiden'
and the group Hanggai
After Hanggai's performance in Groningen in december 2010 the group allowed that pictures were taken and an interview was given.
December 2010
While travelling through China Dolf Heubers found several 'very old' tiger bells in Xi'an.
Marco Hadjidakis reported two B type tiger bells from Burma.
January 2011
an older version of the page on tiger bells in China from this report is copied (with some inaccuracies in the lay out). All other text is in Chinese. At the bottom of the page three icons of little hands making a peace sign and three icons showing a pair of shaking hands are placed. Could this indicate a positive reaction? This is the first sign of interest in the subject from China. Unfortunately the link does not work anymore.
An interesting article by Lancini Jen-Hao Cheng on the social status of various types of bells incl. tiger bells among the Puyuma of Taiwan suggests that tiger bells were made locally.
On eBay, internet shop Harmonic Healing offers several alternative tiger bells of the same variation as prof. Oana's bell from Thailand.
On eBay, the site of www.annarbornazarene.org, one tiger bell type A from Pakistan, dated 1600 - 1700 AD. and one tiger bell type A from Afghanistan, dated 1700 - 1800 AD
February 2011
Leonard Scicluna of LSC Metal Finishing in Qormi, Malta, reports that his firm frequently receives tiger bells from the local population for chrome plating.
Antrhopologist Hendrik Wittenberg donated one of the bells he bought in New York to me. This allowed me to make new photographs that show more details.
June 2011
Although many questions about the tiger bells' history still need to be answered, the answer to the question 'Where do all these aparrently new tiger bells that have popped up in various places all over the world come from?' is now clear: a large factory in East China massproduces copies of various types of tiger bells.
September 2011
Harald Lux from Germany mailed:
I bought six tigerbells on the night market in Luang Prabang and two in Luang Namtha, Laos. If you gave me your email address I would take pictures and send them...
See mr. Lux' pictures and report on this link.
In 2004, while in China Claire Chantrenne, curator of the Music Instruments Museum in Brussels, Belgium, bought a bundle of four bells, of which two are tiger bells. The other two are not tiger bells but occur regularly on objects in combination with tiger bells.
On the Ethnic weapons forum on the website www.vikingsword.com I found a discussion on a Moro sword from Mindanao (The Philippines) with four bells of which two are tiger bells. For details click here. The kampilan (local name of the sword) is the same type of weapon I had seen in the publication Swords from Celebes. The group mentioned by author Foy, are the Lanun. The Lanun, or Ilanun, are a muslim group living in Mindanao (and not in Sulawesi, formerly called Celebes).
November 2011
Dmitri Timoshenko from Tver (Russia) sent an e-mail, titled Hello from Russia. The message was short and intriguing:
Found two tigerbells in Tver region in November 2011. If you are still interested in them I can send you photos and give more details.In december I received mr. Timoshenko's report and photographs. While 'treasure hunting' in a potato field using a metal detector, he found two tiger bells. The potato field is located near Tver, about 150 km. north of Moscow.This is the first case where tiger bells were found as an archeological find. Go to the page.
December 2011
January 2012
Two incidents happened, triggered by Mr. Timoshenko's find of two tiger bells in a potato field in Tver (Russia):
February 2012
Fred Wilkinson of the Nonsuch gallery reports a shaman's bell chain from Tibet. The chain is more or less similar to a chain from Nepal.
April 2012
Ching Dumanhug from Samal Island in the Philippines sent the following mail:
Samal Island lies in the Davao Gulf, in South East Mindanao. The Davao area is home to several ethnic minorities that had and used tiger bells up to very recent times, and some probably still do. I have contacted mr Dumanhug by e-mail but the mail was returned as undeliverable. I hope that mr. Dumanhug reads this and will contact me again so we can try to find a solution to this problem.
October 2012
Henk Orsel from Eindhoven (Neth.) reports that he has seen a documentary on a Roman Catholic missionary who meets a Mongolian shaman. Among the shaman's attributes two tiger bells are clearly visible.
February 2013
Thomas Roszel who lives in Jakarta (Indonesia) and visits Palembang regularly mailed to me that he has several tiger bells in his posession:
Mr. Roszel added several photographs. Unfortunately they came out rather small so he will make new ones. For now you can see some of the small pictures on the Indonesia-page.
On website http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016338
I found some interesting information on the ancestors of the Iban, based on DNA research.
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