HAYS1986-002 - ethnographic attestation
Auyana
Papua New Guinea - Anga-Eastern Highlands men's cult zone - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
Among the Auyana of the Eastern Highlands, the bullroarer carried the voice of an "old man" spirit, while the men's paired flutes were heard as a middle-aged woman with a child — a woman who, in the version Sterling Robbins recorded, was made to sound the way she did "because the men were holding her and doing things with her, not good things either." Terence Hays assembled these reports in a 1986 survey of the Highlands sacred-flute and bullroarer cults, drawing on Robbins and on the ethnomusicologist Vida Chenoweth. Women and children were kept from ever seeing the instruments; Hays notes that for the Auyana, as for the neighboring Kamano, Gahuku, and Asaro, it was reported simply that those who saw the men's sacred instruments "would die" or "would be killed."
the Auyana, whose bullroarers emitted the voice of an "old man" spirit
Hays 1986:440 (Anthropos 81), citing Chenoweth 1976:43 and Robbins 1982:46
- Object
- Hays states that Auyana bullroarers emitted the voice of an old-man spirit, citing Chenoweth and Robbins.
- Function
- Restricted men's sacred-instrument complex with bullroarer spirit-voice evidence; women and children were threatened with death if they saw the men's sacred instruments.
- Map confidence
- medium - Area anchor for Auyana territory east of Kainantu in Eastern Highlands; coordinate may be refined if Chenoweth, Robbins, or a language-area source is recovered.
- Source location
- Anthropos p. 440
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Female-origin myth
- Weather / fertility magic