MUS2026-058 - museum specimen
Maipua bull-roarer (Pitt Rivers)
Papua New Guinea - Purari delta (Maipua), Gulf - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
imunu viki English
Source term: bull-roarer
imunu viki — "weeping spirit"; the Purari-delta name for the bull-roarer, whose whir was heard as the cry of the kaiamunu monster.
Etymology. Clean Purari-delta gloss; the whir of the bullroarer is heard as spirit-cry. (high confidence)
Among the Maipua and their neighbors in the Purari delta, the bull-roarer was the voice of the kaiamunu, a monstrous animal spirit kept as a great cane-and-wicker effigy in the rear of the men's ceremonial house, the ravi. The swung board was called imunu viki, "weeping spirit," and its whirring was heard as the cry of that being. It was sounded during the initiation of boys and at the death of an important man, and its sound was kept from women and the uninitiated. This specimen reached the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1905.
If the bull-roarers, imunu viki (crying imunu), represent ancestral ghosts, the tablets may be (as I suggested long ago) hypertrophied bull-roarers…
A. C. Haddon, 'The Kopiravi Cult of the Namau, Papua', Man 19 (1919), no. 91, p. 178
- Object
- Bull-roarer of the Maipua, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1905.63.50).
- Function
- Maipua/Purari bull-roarer recorded as the voice of kaiamunu/imunu, sounded in boys' initiation and at deaths of important men; kept from women and the uninitiated.
- Map confidence
- medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
- Source location
- 1905.63.50
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth
- Forbidden to women