MUSNAS2008-001 - museum specimen
Sawia locality/dialect
Indonesia - Sawia - Arso-Tami River - Keerom borderland - Oceania - New Guinea
Function not recorded
Source term: Museum Nasional inv. 15928
Early Dutch ethnographers thought the bullroarer barely existed in their half of New Guinea: van der Sande, closing his 1907 north-coast survey, could cite it only among the Marind far to the south. This thin blade of blackened bamboo — twenty-six centimetres, three tapering sections, drilled at one end for a cord now lost — quietly complicates that map. The Museum Nasional in Jakarta records it from Sawia, in the Tami River borderland of the north. Who whirled it there, and why, was never written down.
Alat bunyi-bunyian sejenis bull-roarer yang tidak diketahui nama lokalnya... Pada salah satu ujung alat dilubangi tempat tali.
A sound-instrument of the bullroarer type whose local name is unknown... At one end of the instrument a hole is drilled for the cord.
Museum Nasional, Informasi Koleksi Musik Tradisional Indonesia (2008), pp. 55-56, inv. 15928.
- Object
- Thin blackened bamboo blade, 26 by 2 cm, in three tapering sections, drilled at one end for its cord (cord now lost). Museum Nasional Indonesia inv. 15928.
- Function
- No function recorded.
- Map confidence
- medium_high - Named Sawia locality anchor in the Arso-Tami River / Keerom borderland; not an exact collecting spot.
- Source location
- pp. 55-56