LOEB1929-008 - ethnographic attestation

Kaya-Kaya Tugeri Sosom bullroarer

Indonesia - Papua New Guinea borderlands - Dutch New Guinea near British territory - Oceania

Restricted

Among the Tugeri, or Kaya-Kaya, on the south coast of what was then Dutch New Guinea, the bullroarer and a mythical giant share one name: Sosom. The giant arrives each year with the south-east monsoon — a being of stone, so vast that he stands with one foot on either bank of the Merauke River — and when he comes a festival is held in his honour and the bullroarers are swung; women may not look at him, on pain of death; at the initiation of boys the instrument is Sosom himself, who kills the novices and brings them back to life — in van Baal's fuller account a swallowing, Sosom devouring all the neophytes, "each time he swallows one, disgorging another through his posterior parts." The myth also tells where the instrument came from. Sosom was a brute of a giant who, caught fast in copulation with a girl, could not free himself; the girl's mother cut off his penis with a strip of sago-leaf sheath, and a stork at last drew it out with its beak — and that severed member, van Baal concluded from the traditions, is the first bullroarer. In a coastal telling the organ fell into the river and became a watersnake; in another tradition the men invented Sosom outright, to frighten the women.

Die Kaja-Kaja kennen das Schwirrholz, sosóm. Sosóm heißt auch ein Riese, der der Sage nach jedes Jahr mit dem Südost erscheint. Er ist von Stein und so groß, daß er mit einem Fuß auf dem einen, mit dem zweiten auf dem anderen Ufer des Merauke-Flusses steht. Wenn er kommt, wird ein Fest gehalten, bei dem das Schwirrholz ertönt. Die Frauen dürfen ihn nicht sehen, sonst müssen sie sterben. Ihm werden Knaben, patúr, gebracht, die er tötet, aber wieder zum Leben erweckt.

The Kaja-Kaja know the bullroarer, sosóm. Sosóm is also the name of a giant who, the legend says, appears every year with the southeast wind. He is of stone and so huge that he stands with one foot on one bank of the Merauke River and with the other on the opposite bank. When he comes, a festival is held at which the bullroarer sounds. The women may not see him, or they must die. Boys, patúr, are brought to him; he kills them, but wakes them to life again.

Rudolf Pöch, Vierter Bericht über meine Reise nach Neuguinea, Sitzungsberichte 115 (1906), p. 901.

Function

At boys' initiation the bullroarer is anthropomorphized as Sosom, a mythical giant who kills novices and brings them to life again.

Map confidence

low_medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, or region in Loeb

Source location

Page references

Loeb 1929:253 (and note 18, p. 254); from Webster 1911:495; primary = Pöch, Vierter Bericht (1907); cross-ref Dema 1966:485ff., 534; Pöch 1906:901

• Spirit voice
• Snake-linked
• Initiation rite
• Death and rebirth
• Forbidden to women

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