MUS2026-118 - museum specimen
Koriki
Papua New Guinea - Purari Delta (Pai-i-ara), Gulf Province - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
koe / kwoi English
Source term: bull-roarer
In the Purari Delta a kwoi (koi) is a flat painted ancestor board of the gope type, not the bull-roarer itself; the Namau bull-roarer was called imunu viki, "weeping spirit."
Etymology. In the Purari Delta the word koe (a transcription of koi/kwoi) names the flat, painted gope-type ancestor board — a plank carved with a spirit face that houses a clan's protective ancestral spirit — rather than the bull-roarer proper, which the Namau called imunu viki, 'weeping spirit'. The museum applies koe/kwoi to this bull-roarer object, so the name is shared with, and primarily denotes, the ancestor board. (medium confidence)
An oval wooden board painted with a spirit face, a crocodile, and bands of concentric circles, collected among the Koriki of the Purari Delta and now in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, from the collection of A. C. Haddon, who worked the Papuan Gulf in 1914. The Koriki were one of the Purari-speaking groups outsiders lumped together as the Namau, and such bull-roarers belonged to the men's longhouse, the ravi, the ceremonial seat of the imunu, the spirits. In the Purari Delta the bull-roarer was called imunu viki, "weeping spirit": its whir was the voice of the imunu, sounded at the initiation of boys and again at the deaths of important men, when the sound was heard as a lament. The spirit voiced in it was the kaiaimunu, the monstrous wickerwork being kept in the ravi, into whose jaws initiates were placed and from which they were said to emerge as men. Women and the uninitiated were kept from the board and from the source of its sound.
- Object
- An oval wooden board painted with a spirit face, a crocodile and bands of concentric circles; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (acc. 1916.31.1; A. C. Haddon coll.).
- Function
- Decorated Koriki bull-roarer ('koe'/'kwoi'), Purari Delta, Pitt Rivers Museum (acc. 1916.31.1, A. C. Haddon coll.): an oval wooden board painted with a spirit face, a crocodile and concentric circles. Classed ritual on the ancestral/spirit iconography characteristic of the secret men's-cult (imunu) bull-roarers of the Papuan Gulf.
- Map confidence
- high - Pai-i-ara / Purari Delta locality
- Source location
- 1916.31.1
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth