The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG10 - ethnographic attestation

Abelam (incl.Maprik)

Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul

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The ulke-maira itself — a palmwood blade wound with plant-fibre cord, made by Tarigo at Kalabu I near Maprik in 1965.
The ulke-maira itself — a palmwood blade wound with plant-fibre cord, made by Tarigo at Kalabu I near Maprik in 1965. · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source
A second Abelam ulke collected by Gerd Koch at Maprik in 1966 (VI 48614).
A second Abelam ulke collected by Gerd Koch at Maprik in 1966 (VI 48614). · CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

ulke / wulké; puku English

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

Abelam term for predominantly female spirit beings, associated with pools in the bush. wulké: Ambulas 'bullroarer' — Wulké lé bulu, 'The bullroarer sounds'; puku: 'club (pig); bullroarer.'

Etymology. Among the Abelam, ulke names predominantly female spirit beings associated with pools in the bush (Hauser-Schaeublin), and also the second male-initiation grade and its double-sided carvings. The bullroarer takes its name from a 1965 Berlin object recorded as Ulke-maira (maira = "miracle" or "secret"). (high confidence)

Among the Abelam of the Maprik hills in Papua New Guinea's East Sepik, the bullroarer was one of a battery of hidden sound-makers, alongside flutes, ocarinas, resonators, soundboards and trumpets, whose sounds were taken for the voices of spirits. The great spirit ngwalndu, the clan being with whom a man's soul is thought to go and live after death, was known to women and the uninitiated only as noises issuing from the towering, triangular korambo, the men's ceremonial house. Initiation unfolded in many grades across decades, the first when a boy was five or six and the last between thirty and fifty, reaching at its height the rooms inside the spirit house where painted carvings of the ngwalndu were finally shown. The Berlin Ethnological Museum holds an Abelam bullroarer collected in 1965 under the name Ulke-maira; ulke, the ethnographer Brigitta Hauser-Schaeublin records, is the term for predominantly female spirit beings associated with pools in the bush. In Ambulas speech the instrument is wulké — Wulké lé bulu, 'the bullroarer sounds' — or puku, a word that serves for pig club and bullroarer alike.

Ulke is the term for predominantly female spirit beings, which are also associated with pools in the bush.

Hauser-Schaeublin, "The String Bag of the Tambaran" (ANU Press), p. 61
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Page references

Table 1, row 10; Ambulas lexicon entries 3359, 2273

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