CROWLEY2006-001 - ethnographic attestation
Naman (Lengaleng district), central Malekula
Vanuatu - Central Malekula - Lengaleng - Oceania - Melanesia
Restricted
By the time Terry Crowley sat down with the last speakers of Naman — fewer than twenty, resettled at Litzlitz on the coast — the language of the Lengaleng bush was nearly gone. The bullroarers were not. Men from the Naman country whirled them at circumcision ceremonies, as their Neve'ei neighbours did, and Crowley noted that the practice continued to his own day, outliving the language of the district that kept it. His survey drew the line sharply: Naman men sounded the bullroarer at circumcision; the Neverver and Avava peoples beside them did not.
Men from Naman- and Neve'ei-speaking areas made use of bullroarers as part of circumcision ceremonies.
Terry Crowley, Naman: A Vanishing Language of Malakula (2006), p. 15
- Function
- Men from the Naman-speaking area used bullroarers as part of circumcision ceremonies; Crowley records that the practice was still alive when he wrote in 2006.
- Map confidence
- medium - Lengaleng homeland anchor, inland of Lingarakh and Khatbol on the Nurumbat River per Crowley's territory description; the few remaining Naman speakers now live resettled at Litzlitz on the northeast coast.
- Source location
- pp. 15-17, Table 1, fn. 29
- Initiation rite