The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG101 - ethnographic attestation

Sepoe

Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Carved Papuan Gulf bull-roarer, anthropomorphic lime-inlaid — representative for the Sepoe (Gulf). Science Museum Group A655886.
Representative image. Carved Papuan Gulf bull-roarer, anthropomorphic lime-inlaid — representative for the Sepoe (Gulf). Science Museum Group A655886. Science Museum Group, A655886 (Wellcome Collection) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

tiparu Toaripi (East Elema; Sepoe is a named dialect/village of Toaripi)

Source term: Tiparu

Only a man who had passed initiation could look upon the tiparu; then pigs were killed and a great feast prepared. But when it was swung, every woman and child fled the village — for merely to hear its roar, the Toaripi held, was to die. James Chalmers of the London Missionary Society recorded the bull-roarer and its death-taboo along the Papuan Gulf in the 1880s, among the eastern Elema villages, Sepoe among them, where its name was tiparu.

"Tiparu, only seen by a young man after initiation into manhood, and then pigs are killed, and a large feast prepared. All women and young people leave the village lest they should hear it and die."

Chalmers's LMS specimen description, quoted in A. C. Haddon, The Study of Man (1898), pp. 303-304 (Toaripi / Motu-Motu); cf. p. 303: "Not until after they have left the Eramo is the Roaring Bull [bull-roarer, tiparu] seen."
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use
Function
Gourlay Table 1 row 101 records Sepoe bullroarer occurrence/use; no row-local imunu, women-taboo, or spirit-voice passage is recovered.
Map confidence
medium - representative on-land anchor at Sepoe (regional coordinate fell just offshore of the rendered coastline); not an exact findspot
Source location
Table 1, row 101

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