KUNST1931-001 - secondary catalog
Mombum (Komolom Island)
Indonesia - Komolom Island (south of Yos Sudarso - Kolepom) - Oceania - New Guinea
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarers
bullroarers: English term in Kunst's survey; no Mombum name is recorded.
One island, one village, one people: Komolom, off New Guinea's south coast, held a single community of some 220 souls — the Mombum, whose language is so much their own that a century of linguists has not settled where it belongs. Among them Jaap Kunst's survey of New Guinea's music records the bullroarer: one line for a one-village people, on a low swamp island between the mouth of the Digul and the sea.
Bullroarers are not known to the Ye-anim but they do occur on Komolom Island and Frederick Hendrik Island and also on the upper Digul.
Jaap Kunst, The Native Music of Western New Guinea (1950), book p. 174 / PDF p. 74.
- Object
- Bullroarer reported from Komolom Island; construction not recorded.
- Function
- Occurrence documented; use not recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Pulau Komolom island centroid; source reports island-level occurrence and Mombum comprised a single village.
- Source location
- book p. 174 / PDF p. 74