The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-027 - museum specimen

Malekula (Nivivbur) bull-roarer (museum specimen)

Malekula, Vanuatu - Oceania - Melanesia

Restricted

Seniang Nivivbur bullroarer, Deacon Plate XVI item 5, at far right. The entire plate image and caption are shown.
Seniang Nivivbur bullroarer, Deacon Plate XVI item 5, at far right. The entire plate image and caption are shown. Image source

nevin or or ndeling English

Source term: bull-roarer

nevin or or ndeling: Deacon's own gloss is "the female ear-slitter", or "woman slitting ear" — a gender-marked name, and one of two he offers, since he is visibly unsure whether the compound is agentive (the thing that slits ears) or resultative (the slit ear). Nivivbur = Deacon's Nevinbur, a graded secret/ritual society of South West Bay, Malekula.

Etymology. The bullroarer of the Nivivbur (Nevinbur) graded society of South West Bay, Malekula carries the local name Nevin or.or ndeling, which its collector A.B. Deacon glossed 'woman-slit-my-ear'. Deacon names no second being behind the word, so it stands as a descriptive epithet rather than the name of another entity. (high confidence)

Its name, as Deacon set it down, was "woman-slit-my-ear" — the roar a wound a woman's ear was never meant to hear. This red-tailed blade on its cord belonged to the Nevinbur, a secret society of South West Bay, Malekula, whose men brought spirit-puppets to life behind the dancing-ground fence: the ogress Nevinbimbaau's grandchildren raised and destroyed, her son and his two wives speared and burned. Screened from all of that theatre, women were left only the voice — and the name records what the voice cost them.

Nevinbumbaau is essentially connected with the bull-roarer (Pl. XVI, 5; c.f. f.n., p. 252), for she is the wife of Ambat Malondr, and the noise of this instrument is her voice crooning her child, Sasndaliep, to sleep. The whirring of the bull-roarer is the secret sound of this society, and is very ileo.

A. B. Deacon, Malekula: A Vanishing People in the New Hebrides (1934), p. 462
Object
Bull-roarer of the Malekula (Nivivbur), in the collection of MAA Cambridge (MAA 1927.2185-87 (Deacon)).
Function
The whirring of this blade is the voice of the ogress Nevinbumbaau crooning her child Sasndaliep to sleep, and is the secret sound of the Nevinbur society.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
Page references

MAA 1927.2185 / object 512259; cf. Deacon 1934 (Nevinbur ceremonies, South West Bay); Deacon 1934 pp. 252 n. 1 and 462-463, Pl. XVI item 5

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