Kranket Djabobibi, swung at circumcision

Djabobibi

Source term: Djabobibi (snorhout, Schwirrholz)

Djabobibi: the Madang-coast name for the bullroarer, recorded for Kranket ('Grager') in 1893 and for the Hatzfeldhafen district in 1895.

In 1888 the naturalist Otto Finsch published drawings of two blades from Kranket — 'Grager' — the island in the lagoon at Madang, and filed them in his ethnographic atlas among the lime gourds and spatulas. Five years later the Dutch ethnographers de Clercq and Schmeltz printed a correction: the drawing plainly showed a Djabobibi, the 'whirring-wood' that plays its part at the circumcision ceremony, tied by a cord to a reed and swung in a circle until it hums; Leiden's museum, they added, held a row of matching specimens. Nor was the name a stray word — up the same coast at Hatzfeldhafen, a German district report of 1895 recorded djabobibi as the term for the bullroarers that howled to warn women back from the fenced festival grounds. Of Finsch's two blades, one is plain and pointed with a knobbed grip; the other carries a band of diamond lattice above rows of chevrons.

de afbeelding duidelijk het, bij de besnijdenisceremonie eene rol spelende snorhout, (Schwirrholz) Djabobibi, voorstelt

the illustration clearly depicts the whirring-wood, the Djabobibi, which plays its part at the circumcision ceremony

F. S. A. de Clercq & J. D. E. Schmeltz, Ethnographische beschrijving (1893), p. 78

Particulars

Object

Two blades on Finsch's plate: a long, plain pointed blade with a knobbed grip (half scale), and a narrower strip with a diamond-lattice band over chevron banding (full scale).

Function

Swung at the circumcision ceremony, tied by a cord to a reed and whirled in a circle to produce a humming sound; the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum held matching specimens.