The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG135 - ethnographic attestation

Kafe / Kainantu

Papua New Guinea - Eastern Highlands - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

A Kainantu rhombe on its cord, one of four given by Georges Barbey in 1960.
A Kainantu rhombe on its cord, one of four given by Georges Barbey in 1960. Image source
A second Barbey Kainantu rhombe, 35 cm.
A second Barbey Kainantu rhombe, 35 cm. Image source
A third Barbey Kainantu rhombe, 36.5 cm.
A third Barbey Kainantu rhombe, 36.5 cm. Image source

Source term: pubunani

pubunani: the bullroarer — literally 'a type of fungus; the connection could not be explained' (Berndt 1962:51). guʹnagu gosunamu = 'bullroarer old man', the water-spirit voiced by the roarer at initiation (1962:95). 'Kafe' is Berndt's own alternative name for the Kamano themselves — 'Kamano (Kafe)... are language names as well as general names for the people' (1962:17).

In the Kainantu hills of the Eastern Highlands, the people Berndt called the Kamano — 'Kafe' — told how the men's secrets were made. Jugumishanta, the creator's wife, secretly cut the first flute from bamboo and played it in hiding; her husband Morufonu, envious of a sound about which he knew nothing, “set to work and shaped a bullroarer and swung it, listening to the noise it made. Jugumishanta heard it too and was afraid; she stayed in her house, fastening the door.” Men repeat that reversal at every pig festival: moon after moon the flutes sound through the village at night, joined by swung bullroarers as the feast draws near, to make the pigs increase and the crops advance — while the women, who in the beginning owned the flutes, fasten their doors and hand out pig meat to “feed the spirit.” At initiation the novices are led toward the bush shelter where the flutes play and a bullroarer swings behind, and are told its voice is guʹnagu gosunamu, the “bullroarer old man”: a blue, big-mouthed, belly-less spirit that rises from the water to swallow small boys, and vomits them back only when the fathers throw ripe bananas into the water as ransom. Then comes the revelation — the spirit in the water, the fathers tell their bleeding sons, is actually the initiators themselves. The Kamano name for the instrument, pubunani, means a kind of fungus; why, no one could tell Berndt.

Object
bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use
Function
Men's counter-secret to the woman-invented flute: swung to frighten women, sounded with the flutes at pig festivals to increase pigs and crops, and swung at first-stage initiation as the voice of the swallowing water-spirit guʹnagu gosunamu (Berndt 1962).
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Page references

Table 1, row 135 (citing Glick 1972: 821-822); cf. Gourlay 1975: 50

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