The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-093 - museum specimen

Iari

Papua New Guinea - Purari Delta, Gulf - Oceania - Sahul

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A wooden rhombe carved along one half with chevron zigzags rising into a stylized face, with a small perforation at its pointed tip — the...
A wooden rhombe carved along one half with chevron zigzags rising into a stylized face, with a small perforation at its pointed tip — the Jare/Iari bull-roarer from the Purari Delta documented here. © Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Image source
The same carved Jare/Iari bullroarer in Schaeffner's Plate XI, fig. 4, rotated with its decorated end at left. Schaeffner captioned it as Fly...
The same carved Jare/Iari bullroarer in Schaeffner's Plate XI, fig. 4, rotated with its decorated end at left. Schaeffner captioned it as Fly River region; the modern museum concordance identifies it as Quai Branly 71.1930.29.206 from the Purari Delta. André Schaeffner, Origine des instruments de musique, Plate XI, fig. 4; electronic plate via UQAM Image source

imunu viki French

Source term: bull-roarer

imunu viki: 'weeping spirit' (imunu 'spirit / vital force'), the Namau/Purari-Delta name for the bull-roarer, whose whir is heard as a spirit lamenting a dead man; its sound is also the voice of the kaiaimunu wickerwork monster of the men's house. The I'ai (Iari) are one of the Namau tribes. F. E. Williams, JRAI 53 (1923): 363 (upura imunu / imunu-viki, 'the weeping imunu'); Smidt 1975: 10.

Etymology. In the Purari (Namau) delta the bull-roarer is called imunu viki, 'weeping spirit' — imunu being the Purari word for a spirit or vital force — because its whir is heard as a spirit's cry lamenting a dead man; the I'ai (Iari) are one of the Namau tribes. Its sound is also taken to be the voice of the kaiaimunu, the wickerwork monster kept in the men's house. (medium confidence)

Swung in the towering men's house, its whir was the growl of the kaiaimunu — a monstrous wickerwork beast that “swallowed” each Purari Delta boy and gave him back a grown man. The same slat wept at the funerals of important men: its undulating moan was imunu viki, a spirit lamenting the dead. No woman or uninitiated boy could look on it or learn the source of its voice — F. E. Williams watched whole audiences hurry out of earshot at the bare mention of the name, and found that even most grown men had never paid the pig that initiation demanded. Yet the I’ai’s own slats were made without the usual string-hole: bull-roarers that could not roar, kept sheathed in a sago-leaf bag in every men’s house, their power resting in the object itself as much as in the voice.

Whenever the name is even mentioned, there follows an immediate and hurried retreat of a large number of the listeners. The younger boys will fairly run out of ear-shot.

F. E. Williams, The Natives of the Purari Delta (1924), p. 167
Object
Jare/Iari bullroarer from the Purari Delta (Quai Branly 71.1930.29.206); PRM 1976.23.8 is a later Iari Village Upura Imunu, a 215 mm perforated carved wooden slat with surviving cord.
Function
Voice of the kaiaimunu at male initiation, and the weeping imunu viki at the funerals of important men; its cult was a men's secret society.
Map confidence
medium - approximate culture/locality centroid
Source location
object record 7801 (Quai Branly API); PRM 1976.23.8

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