The Bullroarer Atlas

No. LAYARD1942-001

Atchin ghostly-pig bullroarer voice

Vanuatu · Atchin Island · northeast Malekula · Oceania · Melanesia

Restricted

Deacon’s Plate XVI: the wrapped Nevinbur bullroarer, item 5 at far right, beside mounted effigies including Mansip and his two wives.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Seniang Nivivbur bullroarer, Deacon Plate XVI item 5, at far right. Image source

Source term: bull-roarer

Boys on Atchin went into the initiation lodge and stayed thirty days. They were kept unwashed and covered in dung, ashes and other foul stuff, put through humiliating ordeals, and surrounded by noises they were meant to take for ghosts — initiated men playing the part, whistling softly like birds and flapping wings that were only hands. One sound was no bird. The bull-roarer, on Atchin, was said to be the grunting of ghostly pigs. Every novice eventually learned to make the noises himself, which is the whole design of the thing: the hoax is what gets handed down.

the bull-roarer which in Atchin is said to represent the grunting of ghostly pigs

John Layard, Stone Men of Malekula (1942), p. 494

Particulars

Object
Not recorded.

Source

John Layard, Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (London: Chatto & Windus, 1942), p. 494

View the source

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.