KROLL1938-001 - ethnographic attestation
Bola Bakovi tuvura bullroarer
Papua New Guinea - Willaumez - Talasea Peninsula - West New Britain - New Pommern - Oceania - Sahul
Sacred / spirit
tuvura German / Bola term
Source term: Schwirrholz
tuvura: Bola/Bakovi bullroarer term; no literal gloss or morphology recovered
On the Willaumez Peninsula the Bola, or Bakovi, kept tuvura, the bullroarer, apart from Kuku, the masked season that travelled village to village along the coast — two voices in the same world of dance and transformed beings.
hat der Bola ausser dem tuvura (Schwirrholz) seinen Kuku.
The Bola has besides the tuvura bullroarer his Kuku.
Kroll 1938:412 footnote 1
- Object
- Bullroarer explicitly identified by local term; no material, dimensions, cord, hole, blade shape, mechanics, or object figure is supplied.
- Function
- Named beside the region's spirit institutions: Kroll sets the tuvura alongside the Tolai Dukduk and the Sulka Sisu, counts it among the Bola's named dance-genres, and calls the Kuku mask season 'harmless' by contrast — implying the tuvura was not. No direct use sentence survives.
- Map confidence
- medium - Bola village on the Willaumez Peninsula; representative community anchor rather than a documented performance site.
- Source location
Page references
printed p. 412, footnote 1; viewer page 905