The Bullroarer Atlas

No. MUS2026-388Oceania

Kikori painted-face pair

Papua New Guinea · Kikori, Kikori District, Gulf Province · Oceania

Restricted

A long oval wooden bullroarer, half bare grey wood, half carved in low relief and painted red and white with a round staring face framed by curling arms, a pierced tip at the left.
Plate I. WM-54332: a great round face carved and painted in red and white on the Kikori blade, its cord hole at the tip. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Image source
A long narrow wooden bullroarer, bare and weathered at the left end, the right half carved in low relief with a tall standing figure in white on red.
Plate II. WM-54331, its companion: a tall long-legged figure in white relief on a red ground. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Image source

Source term: zoemhout / snorrebot

Two blades from Kikori carry two different beings. On the longer, a tall figure stands on long legs in low relief, cut into the wood and filled with white over a red ground. On the other a great round face stares out of a red ring, eyes and nose picked out in lime-white, framed by curling arms and a band of dots and zigzags, with the pierced tip that took the cord above its head. Half of each board is left bare and grey. Both were collected at Kikori, on the river of that name in the Gulf of Papua, before 1961, and both belonged to initiation and to dealings with the spirits and the ancestors.

Particulars

Object
Two carved and painted wooden blades, WM-54331 (51 cm) and WM-54332 (47.5 cm), each with half its length worked in low relief in red and white: a long-legged figure on one, a great round face on the other; WM-54332 is pierced at its tip.
Function
Classed with the instruments of initiation and of communication with spirits and ancestors.

Sources

  1. Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, WM-54332, zoemhout, Kikori View
  2. Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, WM-54331, zoemhout, Kikori View

Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.