PNG105 - ethnographic attestation

Keraki

Papua New Guinea - Western - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

The Keraki of the Morehead River trace the world to the sky-being Kambel, who cut down a palm and heard voices inside it — the first people — and watched a shining thing slip from his hands and rise from the palm to become the moon. The bullroarer, their sosa, entered the world through his household: it sounded first for his wife Yuma, until Kambel came on her from behind and snatched it away, and it has belonged to the men ever since; in the neighbouring Kwavaru telling the theft draws the first menstrual blood. Keraki secrecy sat lightly even so — the woman of the myth simply tells her husband, and Williams noted 'there is some fun about it.' In the rite the secret still ruled. A boy met the sosa at initiation 'and not earlier, for he could not then be trusted to keep the secret from his mother'; his sponsor pressed hands over his eyes until the moment of revelation, and in the months of seclusion that followed, the initiates' 'main business, it would seem, is to grow' — growth the Keraki held to be worked by the ritual sodomy of the initiates, chartered by the myth of Kambel's stunted son Gufa.

The boy is initiated to it at the bull-roarer ceremony and not earlier, for he could not then be trusted to keep the secret from his mother.

F.E. Williams, Papuans of the Trans-Fly (1936), on Keraki initiation

Object

bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use

Function

Central secret of male initiation: revealed to boys at the waramongo seclusion hut, kept from women and children; its origin myth gives it first to Kambel's wife before the men's theft

Map confidence

medium - alias_area

Source location

Table 1, row 105

• Forbidden to women
• Women-linked

View source Open this point on the interactive map