The Bullroarer Atlas

DEACON1934-002 - ethnographic attestation

Lambumbu and Uerik Malekula sacred bullroarer

Vanuatu - Central-west Malekula - Lambumbu - Oceania - Melanesia

Restricted

Lambumbu ‘Mother’ and ‘Child’ bullroarers, Deacon Plate XVII section B. The full section and its complete caption are shown.
Lambumbu ‘Mother’ and ‘Child’ bullroarers, Deacon Plate XVII section B. The full section and its complete caption are shown. Image source

navurvur ndalang (Lambumbu); nangamgar nrlalinge (Uerik) English

Source term: bullroarer

navurvur ndalang (Lambumbu) — “ear-slitter” or “slit ear”; s’nen — “The Mother”; natn — “The Child”; nitemah tokhtokh — “the ghost that abides” or “the ghost that waits”; murvaal — “The Warrior.” nangamgar nrlalinge is the Uerik name; its literal meaning is unrecorded.

In Lambumbu, incision made puberty public: after seclusion, a boy’s altered body announced his new standing. The bullroarer was the transition rite’s “principal sacred instrument”—the defining sound of a passage cut into the body. In neighbouring Uerik, novices were finally shown the nangamgar nrlalinge during incision and taught to swing it themselves: guarded sound became knowledge they could now produce.

The bullroarer in this part of the country is called navurvur ndalang, which means "the ear-slitter", or, perhaps, "the slit ear". There are two varieties of these: a long one measuring from about 2 ft. 6 in. to 3 feet, called "The Mother" (s'nen), and a small sharply pointed one some eight inches long, called "The Child" (natn).

A. B. Deacon, Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (1934), p. 252
Object
Two instruments used together, named as kin. ‘The Mother’ (s’nen) is a 2 ft 6 in to 3 ft blade whirled horizontally at about head height for a continuous hum. ‘The Child’ (natn) is a sharply pointed blade about eight inches long, attached like a fish on a line to a stout stake and swept from side to side for a shrill, pulsing whirr. The big one is also nitemah tokhtokh, ‘the ghost that abides’ or ‘the ghost that waits’; the small one is sometimes murvaal, ‘The Warrior.’
Function
Sounded from hidden places within and outside the seclusion house while each novice runs a gauntlet of whipping men in the dark, immediately after the incision operation; the novices are told one story about whose voice it is and the women a different one, and the real nature of the sound is revealed to the lads only on the last day of their seclusion.
Map confidence
high - Named Lambumbu inlet anchor on the central-west Malekula coast; a district/coast proxy rather than a village point.
Source location
Page references

pp. 250-253, esp. p. 252 and Pl. XVIIB; also p. 244; RAI MS 98 files 6/8 and 7/4

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