HAYS1986-003 - ethnographic attestation
Tairora
Papua New Guinea - Anga-Eastern Highlands men's cult zone - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
Among the Tairora of the Eastern Highlands, both the transverse flutes and the bullroarer were publicly declared to be male spirits, their sounds being, in Terence Hays' words, the cries of male spirits. The bullroarer was swung alongside the flutes, and women and children were forbidden even to see the object. The ethnographer Ragnar Johnson, who worked among the Southern Tairora (Ommura) in the 1970s, recorded the iyavati male initiation at night outside the men's house, capturing the spirit cries of bamboo transverse blown and water flutes, bullroarers, and "crying baby" leaves, while inside the house instruction and singing went on. During the rite the initiates were beaten with taroah stinging nettles and wore a pair of pigs' tusks pushed point-upward through a hole in the nasal septum. Hays, surveying the Highlands flute cults, treated the bullroarer as a men's instrument distinct from the flute, marked it against the Tairora in his table of initiation, and noted that there it carried the voice of male spirits.
Moving north- and westwards into the major sacred flute areas, one finds the Tairora, where both flutes and bullroarers were publicly declared to be male spirits (Johnson 1982: 420)
Hays 1986:440 (Anthropos 81), citing Johnson 1982:420
- Function
- Restricted male initiation complex with explicit bullroarer-and-flute spirit-voice evidence; Hays' table also marks Tairora with `B = bullroarer` in initiation.
- Map confidence
- medium - Area anchor for Tairora territory in the Kainantu/Eastern Highlands zone; coordinate may be refined if Johnson 1982 or a language-area source is recovered.
- Source location
- Anthropos pp. 436, 440
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Female-origin myth
- Weather / fertility magic