HAYS1986-004 - ethnographic attestation
Bena Bena pig-festival revelation
Papua New Guinea - Eastern Highlands - Bena Bena valley - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer
Bena Bena country lies around Goroka in the Eastern Highlands, and it marks the western limit of the bullroarer in the New Guinea interior: past the Bena and their immediate neighbours, the sacred flutes ruled the men's cults alone. Here initiation and the great pig-killing festival were barely separable — the festival's name, i’a nama ga, yokes pig to nama, the flute-bird to whom women were made to give food. Novices here went through the region’s bleeding ordeals before the flutes were revealed, not after, as was more usual to the east — the price, as Hays puts it, for finally seeing the human sources of the sacred cries. During the boys' seclusion the flute players walked the village house to house; a woman had to stay inside without looking out and pass a gift of food through her doorway, where a man crouched low with a sharp sliver of bamboo snatched it and cut her hand as he went. Where the bullroarer was present — and among the Bena it was — it was revealed formally alongside the flutes.
- Object
- Bullroarer; no physical description recorded. Hays's distribution table marks the Bena Bena sacred-instrument set as transverse flutes and bullroarer.
- Function
- Sacred men's instrument revealed within the joined initiation and pig-festival complex, sounding beside the paired transverse flutes at the western edge of the bullroarer's Highlands range.
- Map confidence
- high - Geocoded Bena Bena anchor shared with retired Gourlay row PNG133.
- Source location
- pp. 436, 444
- Initiation rite