NGUINEA-015 - ethnographic attestation
Ankave-Anga, Suowi Valley
Papua New Guinea - Southern Anga territory, northernmost Gulf Province at the Morobe - Eastern Highlands junction (Suowi-Mbwei Valley) - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: mautwa
"Bullroarer" in the neighbouring Kapau-Kamea (Kamea) language, recorded by Sandra Bamford (2004) and cited by Bonnemere; the Ankave themselves are reported to have no vernacular term and no bullroarer myth, so mautwa is not an Ankave word.
Among the Ankave-Anga of the remote Suowi Valley, in the foothills that fall away toward the Gulf of Papua, the anthropologist Pascale Bonnemere watched a boys' initiation from the women's side. While the men pierced the novices' septa in the forest, the secluded mothers and sisters flattened themselves on the ground under their bark capes, listening to "the words of the spirits, which we anthropologists know to be the sound of the bullroarers." The humming that rises from the forest, it is said, the women take to be spirit voices. Unlike the neighbouring Kapau-Kamea, among whom Beatrice Blackwood was told it meant death for a woman to see the instrument, the Ankave attach no such danger or myth to the bullroarer; here it concerns the women not at all, save as a voice heard at a distance.
A strange sound rose from the forest above the village; it was the humming of the bullroarers, which the women, it is said, take to be spirit voices.
Bonnemere, Acting for Others (2018), p. 81
- Object
- A whirled wooden bullroarer ("schwirr"-type slat) that hums and "cries" when swung; among the Ankave it is sounded by the initiated men in the forest above the village during the male nose-piercing initiation. Bonnemere describes its voice and use but records no measurements, material, or vernacular name for the Ankave instrument.
- Function
- Whirled by initiated men in the forest at the edge of the village during the boys' nose-piercing initiation; the secluded mothers and sisters, who may hear but not see, are told the humming is the voices of spirits.
- Map confidence
- medium - Representative anchor in the southern Anga highlands. Bonnemere places the Ankave's Suowi Valley in the northernmost part of Gulf Province, at the junction of the Morobe and Eastern Highlands borders, reached from Menyamya (-7.22, 146.02) by a long day's walk south-southwest toward the Gulf of Papua. No published point coordinate exists; the point is set southwest of Menyamya and deliberately offset west of the Upper Watut row (MUS2026-055) to the east.
- Source location
- p. 81 (pull quote); spirit-voice scene later in chap. 'A Long Ritual Journey'; Kapau-Kamea comparison pp. 106-08, citing Blackwood 1978: 124, 158-59 and Bamford 2004
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite