AUSMAIN-019 - secondary catalog
Pitjantjatjara
Anangu lands, NW South Australia - SW Northern Territory near Uluru - Western Desert
Restricted
tjurunga
namatuna / mandagi / windirpiri / kuntanka (Pitjantjatjara, "bull-roarer"; kuntanka = the Pitjentara equivalent of the Aranda churinga/tjurunga); pupi-pupi is the onomatopoeic name imitating its sound; Apuju is the one-legged bull-roarer demon whose voice the uninitiated take the roar to be
Etymology. Roheim's informant Tnyetika ("Erldunda Bob") decomposed the Aranda word tjurunga as "own shame" or taboo: tju (bora, shame) plus runga (own, proper one), "to stop people from talking too loudly about the tjurunga"; runga (own) doubles for knanindja (totem, literally origin). (high confidence)
Among the Pitjantjatjara and their Western Desert neighbours, the bull-roarer belongs to men's secret-sacred initiation. At the close of circumcision the youth is handed the instrument — namatuna, mandagi or windirpiri — smeared with blood and warned, "For the woman's road don't take it; when you whirl it, you keep to the thick scrub only." On the long post-circumcision bush journey the new men swing it as they travel, and at the great ceremony they whirl it through the night to frighten the women and children, who dare not rise until dawn. The roar is given out as the one-legged demon Apuju come to carry the boys off, and the tale runs deeper than a bogey: children are shown the Adam's apple as the scar where Apuju cut off their heads and set them back on, while the initiated know that by "head" the story means the penis, and that the novice is given to the Apuju-woman Milpati — a demoness whose genital hangs from her navel, and who tears the member from any man not a novice who approaches her. Only at initiation does the youth learn that there is no Apuju, and that men make the sound. Geza Roheim recorded all of this on his 1929 expedition into the country around the Tomkinson and Musgrave Ranges.
Before being brought back into the camp, the boys are handed the bull-roarer (namatuna) and told "For the woman's road don't take it." "When you whirl it, you keep to the thick scrub only."
Geza Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream (1945), pp. 13-14
- Object
- Western Desert bull-roarer: namatuna / mandagi / windirpiri, the Pitjantjatjara kuntanka, equivalent of the Aranda churinga.
- Function
- Caveated Western Desert bull-roarer mythology lead; a Cairn search snippet points to Aknarintja women conceiving via rhombe sound, but the chapter page remains gated/not page-locked locally.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- Roheim 1945, pp. 13-15 (initiation + women-taboo, namatuna/mandagi/windirpiri), p. 18 (Pitjentara kuntanka = tjurunga, "no woman may come near it"), p. 109 (namatuna whirled all night to frighten the women and children), pp. 233-234 (the Apuju bull-roarer demon; at initiation the boy learns there is no Apuju and the men make the noise), Appendix pp. 258-259 (Njirana ancestor throws bull-roarer to frighten women); AIATSIS Wallace finding aid pp. 11-12; WALLACE_NP02-001811B and -001812A
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite