MUS2026-023 - museum specimen

Masingara bull-roarer (museum specimen)

Papua New Guinea - Western Province (near Daru) - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

At Masingara, an inland bush village behind Mawata that Gunnar Landtman studied among the Kiwai Papuans, the bullroarer answered to two working names, rirangode and erapisa-pisa — themselves clan totems — but its myth-name was Sosom, shared with a monster of the forest said to eat children at the annual initiation festival. The instrument's coming was folded into the story of Ua-ogrere, a woman who had always existed, never born, and who taught the Masingara their houses, their weapons and their ceremonies; in the version Landtman recorded, its introduction carried a sodomy-and-growth motif, echoed almost word for word in a neighbouring people's telling of Kambel and his son Gufa, a wretched, undersized boy who grew to full stature by the same practice. Two turtleshell blades and their twisted cords are what survive from Masingara itself; the myth that named them survives in Landtman's fieldwork.

the bullroarer has the same name (sosom) as that of a mythical monster in the bush... there seems to be a reminiscence of a monster who eats children

A. C. Haddon and C. G. Seligman, reviewing Gunnar Landtman's Masingara fieldwork, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 50 (1920)

Object

Bull-roarer of the Masingara (Gizra), British Museum Oc1906,1013.152.a; its sibling Oc1906,1013.153 is a tapering turtleshell plate 15.5 x 4.5 x 0.3 cm on a twisted plant-fibre cord, 40.2 cm loose overall.

Function

At Masingara, an inland Kiwai-area bush village behind Mawata, the bullroarer bore the myth-name Sosom, shared with a mythical monster of the bush said to eat children at the annual initiation festival — the same monster-name borne by the Marind-anim bullroarer-god to the west. Its introduction is bound up with the story of Ua-ogrere, a woman who had always existed and taught the Masingara their houses, weapons and ceremonies; Gunnar Landtman recorded a sodomy-and-growth motif attached to the instrument's coming, paralleled almost word for word among neighbouring peoples' versions of the same story. Two working names for the object itself — rirangode and erapisa-pisa, both also clan totems — are recorded separately from Sosom, the myth-name.

Map confidence

medium - approximate culture/locality centroid

Source location

Page references

BM Oc1906,1013.152.a | British Museum Oc1906,1013.153; Landtman 1917:77; Riesenfeld 1950; Williams 1936; Cambridge Reports vol. I (1935)

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite

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