OCEXP-004 - related instrument
Tamate liwoa ("Great Tamate") society, Vanua Lava
Vanuatu - Banks Islands (Torba) - Oceania - Island Melanesia
Restricted
werewere English
werewere: Codrington's name for the friction device. salagoro: the bush enclosure of the Tamate society. tamate: ghost, and by extension the society and its mask (Mota). meretang: a further Tamate sound-instrument that Rivers suggests also filled the vacancy left by the bullroarer.
Two men of the Great Tamate society, walking a stretch of Vanua Lava shore that ghosts were known to haunt, heard a sound they could not account for. It came from an old woman sitting there grinding down shell money on a stone, under her palm-leaf umbrella. They ran in upon her, killed her, and carried off the stone and the umbrella. What they took was this: a flat smooth stone, rubbed with the butt of a palm-leaf fan-stalk, the leaf itself doing the sounding — and the player can work it up and down in strength and tone at will, a control no swung slat allows. It is sounded from the *salagoro* at daybreak, and the uninitiated hear the ghosts. It is not a bull-roarer, and that is Codrington's point. The bull-roarer was perfectly well known in the Banks Islands — children swung it for fun and called it "the pig," after its grunt — and a secret everyone has already seen is no longer usable as a secret. So the societies changed instruments, and the voice they settled on for the dead was one a woman had made first, without meaning to.
This apparatus does the work which the 'bull-roarer,' too well known in the Banks' Islands to be used in mysteries, performs elsewhere.
R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), p. 80.
- Object
- Not a bullroarer: a flat smooth stone on which the butt-end of the stalk of a palm-leaf fan is rubbed. The vibration of the fan makes the sound, and the performer can modulate it in strength and tone at will — a control no swung roarer offers.
- Function
- Sounded at daybreak from the recesses of the salagoro, the society's bush enclosure, to persuade the uninitiated that the ghosts were present. Codrington states outright that it does the work the bullroarer does elsewhere, and that the bullroarer is not used in Banks Islands mysteries because it is too well known there.
- Map confidence
- medium - Vanua Lava island centroid, Banks Islands. Codrington names the island but not the village.
- Source location
Page references
p. 80; secondary discussion at Rivers 1914 vol. II p. 458
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women
- Female-origin myth