The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-092 - museum specimen

Kapriman

Papua New Guinea - Sepik (Kambaramba), East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

A dark wooden board painted with a white triangular tooth border and two large eye-like circles, its narrow tang notched — a New Guinea...
Representative image. A dark wooden board painted with a white triangular tooth border and two large eye-like circles, its narrow tang notched — a New Guinea bull-roarer held by the British Museum, shown for the general form; not the Kapriman rhombe, known locally as Furtedjuwi, from Kambaramba on the Sepik, documented here. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1951-07-4) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Furtedjuwi French

Source term: bull-roarer

Swing it on its cord and the wood howls — and among the Kapriman, forest people of the Korewori and Blackwater rivers of the Middle Sepik, that howl is a men's secret no woman may set eyes on. This bullroarer even carries its own name, Furtedjuwi. The Kapriman are known for their paired spirit-masks and spindly hook-figures, yet the rhombe holds the plainest law of the men's house, recorded flatly by the collectors who took it to Paris: women cannot see it.

Les femmes ne peuvent le voir.

Women cannot see it.

Quai Branly API object 271699
Object
Quai Branly object 71.1961.103.342.1-2: Kapriman rhombe, local name Furtedjuwi, from Kambaramba.
Function
Quai Branly API records a Kapriman rhombe named Furtedjuwi and explicitly says women cannot see it.
Map confidence
high - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
object record 271699 (Quai Branly API)

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