No. MUS2026-069
Bosavi Kaluli roarer
Papua New Guinea · Mount Bosavi, Great Papuan Pla · Oceania · Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bull-roarer
"Zoemhout" is Dutch museum cataloguing for "bull-roarer" (literally "humming wood").
Humming-wood — zoemhout — is what the Dutch catalogue calls this Kaluli bull-roarer from the slopes of Mount Bosavi. Few sound-worlds in New Guinea are better mapped than the Kaluli's: Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment follows their instruments down to the sob mussel-shell rattle, the uluna jew's harp, and the hand drum heard as a bird's weeping voice. This one is small, sixteen and a half centimetres of wood, and came to Rotterdam in 1968 under a second name beside the Dutch: gaso chi.
Particulars
- Object
- Small wooden bull-roarer, 16.5 x 3 cm, of the Kaluli, Mount Bosavi; Wereldmuseum WM-74192 ('Zoemhout - gaso chi').
- Function
- Not recorded.
Source
Wereldmuseum (NMVW), WM-74192, 'Zoemhout - gaso chi' (Kaluli, Mount Bosavi; wood, 16.5 x 3 cm; purchased 1968; documentation Th. G. Schultze-Westrum; record flagged by the museum as possibly non-validated),; Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982)