The Bullroarer Atlas

EXH2026-054 - secondary catalog

Borli/Boli

Papua New Guinea - Borli - Boli (Waria watershed) - Oceania

Restricted

A ceremonial bull-roarer from Baramura on the Fly River, its petaloid board carved with a hooded anthropomorphic face, collected by Gunnar...
Representative image. A ceremonial bull-roarer from Baramura on the Fly River, its petaloid board carved with a hooded anthropomorphic face, collected by Gunnar Landtman in 1912; a representative New Guinea piece, not the Borli/Boli object documented here. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1912-1217-5) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

bora English

Source term: bullroarer

bora: Haddon's Borli/Boli term for the bull-roarer; guhu-bora: the initiation-house context in his summary.

Etymology. Bora is the Borli name of the bullroarer, and the word runs through the whole initiation vocabulary Haddon reports from Chinnery: the bush seclusion house is the guhu-bora and the initiated men who terrorise the novices are the bora keda. The uninitiated took its sound for the voice of evil spirits in human form; no literal meaning of the word is recorded. (medium confidence)

Boys were shut inside the initiation house the Borli called guhu-bora, and there the bora bull-roarer was swung without pause, its drone carrying out to the village as the voice of evil spirits. The scene reaches us only at second hand: in 1920 A. C. Haddon restated the field notes of E. W. P. Chinnery — the patrol officer who had traced the Waria River to its source — recording among these forest people of the Morobe watershed the seclusion, the ceaseless swinging, and the spirit-voice, though not who was forbidden to hear it.

the bull-roarer, bora, is constantly swung

Haddon 1920, 'Migrations of Cultures in British New Guinea,' JRAI 50, Borli/Boli summary from Chinnery material
Object
Bora bull-roarer in Borli/Boli initiation-house rites, known through Haddon's 1920 secondary restatement of Chinnery material.
Function
Secondary-confirmed Borli/Boli initiation-house bull-roarer: Haddon restates Chinnery material with the bora swung during the guhu-bora rites and heard as the voice of evil spirits; direct Chinnery pages remain unrecovered.
Map confidence
low - Boli (Waria watershed), approximate
Source location
Haddon 1920 pp. 249-250, 268-269; Chinnery Report No. 4 pp. 59-61 still unrecovered

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