The Bullroarer Atlas

No. GERRITS1973-001

Five slides of the bullroarer's swing

Papua New Guinea · East Sepik · Wosera · Oceania · Sahul

Restricted

A plain Wosera wooden blade with a forked end and fibre cord wound around it and coiled beside it, British Museum.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. A plain Wosera blade with its fibre cord, British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Image source
An initiator swings the bullroarer inside the palm-frond enclosure at Serangwandu, Wosera, 1973.
Plate II. An initiator swings the bullroarer inside the palm-frond enclosure at Serangwandu, Wosera, 1973. Image source

During an initiation at Serangwandu in the Wosera, the southern country of the Abelam, an initiator showed how the bullroarer makes its voice: he readied the blade inside the palm-frond enclosure, then swung it at high speed in circles around his own body. Fred Gerrits caught the whole sequence on five slides in January 1973 — the preparation, then the blur of the orbiting blade. Photographs of the swing itself, rather than the finished object in a case, are among the rarest documents the instrument has.

Particulars

Object
Painted wooden blade on a cord, swung at high speed in circles around the initiator inside a palm-frond initiation enclosure.
Function
Sounded in male initiation: Gerrits's January 1973 slide sequence at Serangwandu shows an initiator preparing the bullroarer and then swinging it at high speed around himself.

Source

Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, fonds Fred Gerrits (1933-2022), colour slides PF0153088-PF0153092 (cliches 6614-6618), January 1973: 'Initiation in Serangwandu village (Wosera): demonstrating the use of bullroarer'; frame captions 'Initiator preparing to demonstrate how the bullroarer is producing its sound' and 'The bullroarer being swung at high speed around the initiator'

View the source · archived

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.