PNG112 - ethnographic attestation
Lake Kutubu
Papua New Guinea - Southern Highlands - Oceania - Sahul
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
At Lake Kutubu, in the Foi country of the Southern Highlands, the bullroarer is an outsider. Williams, who worked among the lake people in 1939, recorded that they have no sacred flutes and that even the bullroarer was a recent importation, not an inherited rite. Gourlay's survey keeps it on that footing: the instrument is present but carries no local initiation, no spirit cult, no screen against women that the ethnography can name. It sits at the western edge of the highland flute zone as a borrowed object, sounded without the secret apparatus that surrounds it a short distance to the south in the Papuan Gulf.
even the bullroarer is a recent importation
Gourlay 1975, p. 16, citing Williams 1940a: 14
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 112 records a Lake Kutubu bullroarer occurrence; local Gourlay prose notes that even the bullroarer was a recent importation, while the Williams page for the Usi-cult reading is not recovered.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
- Gourlay 1975: 16 (Williams 1940a: 14); Gourlay 1975 Table 1, row 112