DEACON1934-004 - ethnographic attestation
Big Nambas, northwest Malekula plateau
Vanuatu - Northwest Malekula - Big Nambas plateau - Oceania - Melanesia
Function not recorded
When Arthur Bernard Deacon died of blackwater fever on Malekula in 1927, aged twenty-four, his field papers went home without him. Camilla Wedgwood sorted them in London into the book that made his name — and into files of loose ends, among them a single typed page headed 'Bull-roarer, Big Nambas.' The people of the high northwest plateau, whom outsiders then knew hardly at all, had shown or told him something about the instrument; that one page, still unpublished in the Royal Anthropological Institute's archive, is the only trace of what.
Bull-roarer, Big Nambas. 1 p.
Royal Anthropological Institute, A. B. Deacon collection, MS 98/7/2 (catalog entry)
- Function
- Not recorded: the one-page field note attesting the instrument was never published, so its use among the Big Nambas is unstated.
- Map confidence
- medium - Big Nambas plateau anchor (Amok area), the group's traditional interior stronghold in northwest Malekula.
- Source location
- RAI MS 98/7/2