MUS2026-043 - museum specimen

Goaribari

Papua New Guinea - Goaribari, Gulf Province (Kikori delta) - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Catalogued in Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum as a Goaribari bull-roarer, this carved board was carried home from the 1903-04 Cooke Daniels Expedition to the Kikori delta of Papua New Guinea's Gulf Province, yet its identity is doubly uncertain. The museum's own record hedges that it may be a "Bullroarer derivitive', possibly an ancestor tablet," and the Goaribari, a Kerewa people famed instead for their headhunters' skull racks (agiba) and painted gope spirit-boards, are reported by regional ethnographers to have lacked bull-roarers altogether. If it is one, it belongs to the wider Papuan Gulf belt, and especially the Purari Delta, where the swung board is the imunu viki, the "weeping spirit": a sacred voice sounded by select society men at the death of a chief and in male initiation, when its thunder was heard as the cry of the kaiamunu, the monstrous wickerwork beasts kept hidden in the men's house and forbidden to the uninitiated.

In the Purari Delta, bull-roarers called imunu viki, meaning weeping imunu, were sounded by a special society when a chief died.

In the Purari Delta, bull-roarers called imunu viki, meaning weeping imunu, were sounded by a special society when a chief died.

Art-Pacific.com (Friede), "Papuan Gulf Carvings," gulfcarv.htm

Object

Bull-roarer of the Goaribari, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1905.63.14).

Function

In the Papuan Gulf the bull-roarer (imunu viki, 'weeping spirit') is a hidden sacred object sounded only by initiated secret-society men in the kaiamunu initiation cult.

Map confidence

medium - approximate culture/locality centroid

Source location

1905.63.14

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite

View source Open this point on the interactive map