The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG123 - ethnographic attestation

Maipka

Papua New Guinea - Western Highlands - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

A long, tapering wooden blade left mostly plain but for a band of fine incised triangles near the pierced end - a generic New Guinea...
Representative image. A long, tapering wooden blade left mostly plain but for a band of fine incised triangles near the pierced end - a generic New Guinea bullroarer, not the object tied to Maipka's sacred-flute practice that this page documents. © The Trustees of the British Museum (E/Oc1906-1013-54) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Image source

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

In K.A. Gourlay's 1975 survey of New Guinea's esoteric instruments, Maipka — the place now called Kol Station, in the Jimi Valley, then administered as part of the Western Highlands — is logged as holding both the bullroarer and the men's sacred flute. The entry is a single line in his comparative table: the instruments are recorded as present and in use, but no account of the rites or the spirits they voiced is preserved here.

Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
medium - alias_area
Source location
Table 1, row 123

View source Open this point on the interactive map