The Bullroarer Atlas

MUS2026-145 - ethnographic attestation

Pur / Pulo Anna, Sonsorol State

Palau - Southwest Islands - Pulo Anna (Pur), Sonsorol State - Oceania - Micronesia

Function not recorded

Representative—not this record’s object: a wooden bullroarer from New Guinea.
Representative—not this record’s object: a wooden bullroarer from New Guinea. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1925-0213-4) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

zorien English translation (German original)

Source term: bull roarer

zorien - Pur/Pulo Anna word explicitly glossed as bullroarer; no further gloss or object description is supplied.

Pulo Anna — Pur in the old German South Seas Expedition record — is a speck of an island in Palau’s remote Southwest chain, days of open water from the main archipelago. When the expedition worked up Ernst Sarfert’s 1909 field notes, it preserved a single word of the island’s sound-world: zorien, the bull-roarer. That one gloss is the whole record — nothing on the wood, the cord, the occasion, or who was allowed to swing it — but it is enough to place the instrument in one of the smallest and most isolated communities in the Pacific.

They use the word zorien for the bull roarer.

Eilers, West Carolines, vol. 1: Pur, p. 221 (2017 English translation).
Object
Bullroarer named zorien; construction is not described.
Function
Specific use is not recorded.
Map confidence
medium_high - Pulo Anna island centroid (Pur/Puro in the source); tiny island, not an exact performance site.
Source location
Pur p. 221 (2017 English translation)

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