The Bullroarer Atlas

No. CARROLL2024-005

Sota sosam

Indonesia · Sota village, Merauke Regency, South Papua, on the border with Papua New Guinea · Oceania · Sahul

Function not recorded

Bull-roarer from the Kumusi River, NE British New Guinea
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Bull-roarer from the Kumusi River, NE British New Guinea Image source

sosam

Source term: bullroarer: sosam

sosam: bullroarer (Yamfinder, Ngarna, Sota, Emil Mittag field data)

At Sota, a Kanum village just inside Indonesia on the border with Papua New Guinea, Ngarna speakers call the bullroarer sosam. Sosom was the giant of the Marind cult whose voice the roarer was, and a hill in Sota land near Yanggandur played an important part in every annual round of his rites. Yet the people of Sota insisted the cult was the Marind's, not theirs, though some of their men had joined in. Like the Trans-Fly peoples to the east, the Kanum were great growers of yams, and their feasts were contests of giving food.

Particulars

Object
A bullroarer, called sosam; its form is not recorded.
Function
Not recorded.

Sources

  1. Matthew J. Carroll, Wolfgang Barth, Nicholas Evans et al., Yamfinder: The Southern New Guinea Lexical Database (University of Melbourne), concept 'bullroarer' View
  2. CLDF dataset derived from Carroll et al., "Yamfinder: The Southern New Guinea Lexical Database", Lexibank release v1.0 (2024) View
  3. J. van Baal, Dema: Description and Analysis of Marind-anim Culture (The Hague, 1966), pp. 13, 267-268 View · archived

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.