DUBOIS1981-001 - ethnographic attestation
Mare / Nengone, Loyalty Islands
New Caledonia (France) - Loyalty Islands - Mare - Oceania - Melanesia
Function not recorded Candidate only
Marie-Joseph Dubois spent twenty-five years on Maré and spoke its language; when he came to write the island's history he put it flatly: the Maré people knew the boomerang and the bullroarer. He set the sentence in his account of the island's first inhabitants — the people of the traditions, before the si Welo canoes brought the Melanesian order. No name, no specimen, and no rite survive alongside the claim: one sentence from the man who knew Maré best, standing against the received view that the Kanak world had no bullroarer at all.
Les Maréens connaissaient le boomerang et le rhombe.
The Maré people knew the boomerang and the bullroarer.
Marie-Joseph Dubois, Histoire résumée de Maré (1981), p. 5
- Function
- Not recorded: Dubois states only that the Mare people knew the bullroarer, in his account of the island's traditional first inhabitants; no name, mechanics, rite, or specimen.
- Map confidence
- medium - Mare island centroid, Loyalty Islands.
- Source location
- p. 5