AUSMAIN-032 - ethnographic attestation
Mularatara / Matuntara
Southern Western Desert: Palmer River country south of the Levi Range, east to Erldunda and west to Curtin Springs, extending across the Northern Territory border into northern South Australia - Western Desert (Central Australia)
Restricted
namatuna Western Desert (Matuntara / Southern Loritja)
namatuna: the Western Desert term for the bull-roarer in Roheim's southern Central Australian tribes - a flat slat whirled on a cord, sounded at initiation and forbidden to women.
Etymology. namatuna, the small whirled bull-roarer of Roheim's southern Central Australian tribes, carries no recorded literal meaning, but its roar is explained to Mularatara women and children as the one-legged demon Apuju, and Roheim classes Apuju and Maiutu among the lame 'bull-roarer beings' who are at once person and object. The instrument's name and the demons' names remain distinct words. (high confidence)
Among the Mularatara — a southern Western Desert people of the Palmer River country, also recorded as the Matuntara — the bull-roarer (namatuna) was sounded at boys' circumcision and kept hidden from women and children. Its roar was the voice of a being: children at the circumcision ground were told that the one-legged demon Apuju had chased them, and Apuju and Maiutu, the "bull-roarer beings," were imagined as lame or one-footed. Geza Roheim gathered the account from his Mularatara informant Kanakana. The tale carried an inner sense reserved for the initiated — the severed and restored "head" of the Apuju story, and the demon-woman Milpati — told in full among the Pitjantjatjara, with whom the Mularatara shared the myth; and across the neighbouring southern tribes the instrument's hum announced the spirit to whom a boy was being given.
Thus when the boy is being circumcised the Pitjentara and the Mularatara tell the children that the one-legged Apuju has chased them. ... Maiutu, Apuju, and other bull-roarer beings are lame or they have only one foot.
Geza Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream (New York: International Universities Press, 1945), pp. 82, 88.
- Object
- A flat wooden slat (namatuna) swung on a cord to produce a roaring hum, sounded at male initiation; in Roheim's southern Western Desert tribes the namatuna's roar is held to be the voice of a being, and at circumcision children are told the one-legged Apuju has chased them.
- Function
- Sacred bull-roarer (namatuna) sounded at boys' circumcision/initiation; its roar is the voice of a spirit-being (Apuju/Maiutu), kept from women and children.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate territory centroid (Palmer River country south of the Levi Range, between Curtin Springs ~25.30 S/131.75 E and Erldunda ~25.22 S/133.19 E, drifting south toward the NT/SA border)
- Source location
- pp. 82 and 88 (Apuju / bull-roarer-being passages); namatuna whirled and forbidden to women, ch. on initiation; erratum p. xii ("Under '6' above, Matuntara should read Mularatara")
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite