NGUINEA-005 - museum specimen
Sirorata sova bullroarer (Oro Province)
Papua New Guinea - Oro Province - Sirorata - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
sova English
Source term: sova (Bullroarer)
A bullroarer from Sirorata, an Orokaiva village in the Oro Province of Papua New Guinea, now in the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology as object 2623/2, held under the name sova — close to, but not confirmed identical with, umbubu, the general Orokaiva bull-roarer term Williams himself records: "a thin slat of palm-wood with a hole drilled through one end." The museum wrote down nothing of its use, but F. E. Williams, the government anthropologist of the Orokaiva, recorded what the instrument did at a southern initiation: boys and girls sat hooded in bark-cloth while men pulled trees down on long lianas and sounded the bull-roarers, notes running from the deepest bass to a piercing siren-like shriek — to the hooded children the voices of the embahi, spirits of the dead, who gabbled "Kambo, kambo, kambo!" — "Bite, bite, bite!" In the morning the initiates were shown the bull-roarers and flutes that had terrified them overnight. The museum's name for the object, sova, sits close to sovai, the Orokaiva word for those spirits of the dead — a nearness the record itself does not explain.
The bull-roarer and the flute are esoteric objects in that they are never seen but only heard by the uninitiated.
F. E. Williams, Orokaiva Society (1930), p. 277.
- Object
- UBC Museum of Anthropology sova, object type Bullroarer; object number 2623/2; place made Papua New Guinea: Oro, Sirorata.
- Function
- Among the Orokaiva the bull-roarer was an esoteric initiation instrument: never seen but only heard by the uninitiated, its booming passed off as the voice of the siango or embahi, the spirits of the dead, and candidates — boys and girls alike — were brought into its secret at initiation. Documented by Williams for the Southern Orokaiva; no use is recorded for this specimen itself.
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative Sirorata / Oro Province anchor; exact object findspot not separately geocoded.
- Source location
- UBC MOA object 2623/2
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite