NGUINEA-003 - secondary catalog
Yei-nan (Yei / Yey)
Indonesia - Upper Maro River, Merauke regency, near the PNG border - Oceania - New Guinea
Restricted
kupor
kupör — the Yei-nan bullroarer, a spatula-like slat of orei wood; the supreme male symbol, ritually "swallowed" and extracted in initiation.
Among the Yei-nan of the Upper Maro River, near the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea border, the bullroarer was the supreme male symbol, identified outright with Orei, the spirit who led the ancestral beings to their territories. The founding myth tells of a giant orei tree in which all the ancestor-spirits, the yevale, once lived. When the tree was chopped open, each yevale took a chip of its wood away to his own country, and those chips became the kupor, the bullroarers used in all the Yei-nan's magic; Orei then ferried the spirits by canoe along the rivers, handing each his own kupor as the token of his authority. The slat itself — spatula-shaped, of orei wood, rubbed with kunai-grass and lime to make it squeak at a high pitch — was swung for days while the men lay in forest seclusion, fasting. Initiation was triggered not by the boys but by a girl's first menstruation: as she sat hidden in a round hut with her mother, the novices were told the bullroarer would enter their bodies under the lifted tongue, and made to dance until the older men suddenly pulled the implement back out. Where it emerged decided the boy's path: from a leg or an arm, a healer; from near the genitals, a potential sorcerer, who might be sent to the neighbouring Kanum for training in black magic. Women were never permitted to see any of it. The rite was recorded in the field papers of the Roman Catholic missionary Jan Verschueren, in whose account the implement was life-bringing and death-bringing at once.
Usually the kupör will have been rubbed with kunai-grass and lime, a treatment promoting the production of a high-pitched squeaking noise.
Van Baal, Jan Verschueren's Description of Yéi-nan Culture (1982:60)
- Object
- Spatula-like wooden slat swung on a cord and rubbed with kunai-grass and lime to give a high-pitched squeaking voice.
- Function
- Core of the kollu-kollu male initiation: swung for days, symbolically 'swallowed' and 'extracted' from the novice's body, embodying masculine/phallic power.
- Map confidence
- high - approximate territory centroid (mining 2026)
- Source location
- pp. 49, 60-64
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked