The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-055 - museum specimen

Anga (Angu)

Papua New Guinea - Morobe–Gulf fringe (Anga) - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Anga (Angu) bull-roarer, Pitt Rivers Museum (acc. 1938.36.787).
Anga (Angu) bull-roarer, Pitt Rivers Museum (acc. 1938.36.787). © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (acc. 1938.36.787) Image source

akwi-ó Anga (Kukukuku; Angan family, Morobe Province, PNG)

Source term: bull-roarer

Among the Anga, or Kukukuku, of the Upper Watut, Beatrice Blackwood photographed the bull-roarer swung from the high seat during a boy's nose-piercing initiation, the novice waiting and the piercer beside him. She collected this plain wooden example, tapered to a point and undecorated, on the same 1936-37 expedition into the then-unadministered country above the Papuan Gulf - one of more than two thousand objects that became the basis of her monograph The Kukukuku of the Upper Watut. No use was written down for this particular piece, but the rite itself she set down in photograph after photograph.

Object
Bull-roarer of the Anga (Angu), Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1938.36.787).
Function
Blackwood photographed the bull-roarer being swung in the Anga nose-piercing initiation; no use is recorded for this particular specimen.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
1938.36.787

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