PNG112 - ethnographic attestation
Lake Kutubu
Papua New Guinea - Southern Highlands - Oceania - Sahul
Play / practical
amaga English
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
At Lake Kutubu, in the Foi country of the Southern Highlands, the bullroarer is an outsider. F. E. Williams, who worked among the lake people in 1939-40, found the cult confined to a single village, Wasemi, and recorded its native name, amaga — "a small slat of palmwood, ill-shapen and devoid of ornament." His informant, Waipi, was the only initiated man he could find to interpret it for him. Williams read the whole complex as a recent, only half-assimilated import from the Kaibu (Fasu) people to the west, arriving alongside other borrowed customs — betel-chewing and cannibalism among them — rather than as a native Foi rite. The instrument 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
- A small slat of palmwood, "ill-shapen and devoid of ornament" (Williams); cult headquarters confined to the village of Wasemi, described to Williams by his informant Waipi as an import from the Kaibu (Fasu) people.
- Function
- Recent, only half-assimilated import from the Kaibu (Fasu) people per Williams, confined to Wasemi village; no local initiation, spirit cult, or women's taboo recorded.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
Page references
Gourlay 1975: 16 (Williams 1940a: 14); Gourlay 1975 Table 1, row 112; Williams 1940-41:273 (reprint pagination)