PNG100 - ethnographic attestation
Moripi
Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
tiparu Toaripi (Motu-Motu), Eastern Elema; Moripi (Moripi-Iokea) is a name of the Toaripi language
Source term: tiparu (Tiparu)
Its voice was fatal to overhear. When the tiparu — the "roaring bull" — was about to sound, the women and children of these eastern Papuan Gulf villages fled the settlement, for anyone who heard it was said to die. Only a youth who had passed through initiation inside the Eramo, the men's long house, was permitted to see the whirling blade. The missionary James Chalmers, living among the Toaripi in the 1890s, set the rule down plainly: no one sees the tiparu until after he has been made a man.
"Not until after they have left the Eramo is the Roaring Bull [bull-roarer, tiparu] seen" ... "Tiparu, only seen by a young man after initiation into manhood ... All women and young people leave the village lest they should hear it and die."
A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), "The Bull-Roarer," pp. 303-304 (Toaripi/Motu-Motu, after Chalmers and an L.M.S. museum label).
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 100 records Moripi bullroarer occurrence/use and sacred-flute occurrence; Holmes 1924 remains an optional acquisition target for ritual detail.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 100
- Initiation rite