PNG106 - ethnographic attestation
Kiwai
Papua New Guinea - Western - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
madubu Kiwai (Trans-Fly / Western Province, Papua New Guinea)
madubu — the bullroarer's true (secret) name at Iasa, per Haddon; in the coastal Kiwai origin tale the instrument also bears the onomatopoeic name bigu/boigu, 'for it called out its own name when whirling round' — the same sound-word the Mabuiag islanders across the strait use for their deep-noted bigu (Landtman, Folk-Tales, no. 261). Chalmers' Fly-mouth specimen bore the name Buruvia-maramu, 'the mother of the yams' (buruma, a yam variety + maramu, 'mother') — the same buruma-maramu recorded in Landtman's museum name-bundle.
In the western Fly River and Kiwai Island country, bullroarers hung in the men's long houses, off-limits to women and the uninitiated — but their real work was in the gardens. At Iasa the madubu's whirling was expected to fill the plots with yams, sweet potatoes and bananas; a novice first met it behind a tabooed fence in the bush, where he learned to make the crop-bringing voice, and in the garden rite Landtman recorded, a husband and wife's mingled fluids were smeared on the blade so that its swinging scattered the 'medicine' across the field. One roarer the missionary Chalmers sent to England from the Fly mouth was labelled Buruvia-maramu — 'the mother of the yams.' The darimo, the men's house, held the Kiwai's two great secret rites: the moguru, most secret and most important, with its sexual instruction of pubescent boys and girls, and the mimia fire ordeal. And the coastal Kiwai of Mawata kept the instrument's origin story — the first bullroarer flew whizzing into the air crying 'bigu-bigu-bigu,' announcing its own name. The Fly River Kiwai tell that an old woman found the first bullroarer while chopping firewood, and that it came to her afterwards in a dream to tell her its own name and to teach her the rite for the yams. She told her husband and he told the men. No quarrel between the sexes enters the story anywhere — which is of a piece with the old woman who still had her place at the yam planting.
At Iasa, in Kiwai, I was informed there were two initiation ceremonies. At the first a madubu, or bull-roarer, is shown to each koiameri (the kernge of the Western islands) in a tabooed and fenced-in portion of the bush, and he is taught how to use it ... the whirling of the madubu insures a good crop of yams, sweet potatoes and bananas.
A. C. Haddon (ed.), Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. V (1904), "Notes on the Initiation Ceremonies in Kiwai," p. 218.
- Object
- Bullroarer in use here; the object itself is not described. A related exact specimen, Cambridge MAA Z 8273 (OH 1323), collected at Iasa by Haddon in 1898, is an oval wood blade carved with different incised geometric designs on each face (zigzags, toothed triangles, cross-hatching, and groups of triangles on one face, diamonds on the other), finished in red ochre and white lime, with a surviving plaited plant-fibre suspension loop. Catalogued dimensions are given only as 135 × 5 × 50 mm, in an unspecified order.
- Function
- Revealed at initiation and whirled to ensure good crops of yams, sweet potatoes, and bananas.
- Map confidence
- high - Village or district coordinate for the named people.
- Source location
Page references
Table 1, row 106; Haddon 1904, pp. 218-219 and Fig. 30 (p. 218); Haddon 1901, pp. 104-106; van Baal, BKI 119 (1963), p. 204
- Snake-linked
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth
- Agriculture / crop magic