PNG135 - ethnographic attestation
Kafe / Kainantu
Papua New Guinea - Eastern Highlands - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
"Kafe" denotes the Kamano-Kafe language (East New Guinea Highlands Stock), spoken in the Kainantu and Henganofi Subdistricts; "Kainantu" is the administrative town and Subdistrict centre.
At initiation the Kamano-Kafe boys of the Kainantu hills were shown the sacred flutes for the first time — paired pipes whose cry they had been raised, as children, to fear as a spirit's voice, now revealed as a men's secret sworn never to be betrayed to women. The bullroarer belongs to this same guarded instrument-world of the flute cult, logged here beside those pipes. But its own voice goes unrecorded for these people: what spirit they heard in it, or when it was swung, the surviving sources do not say.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 135 records Kafe/Kainantu bullroarer and sacred-flute occurrence; no row-local source page was recovered for women exclusion or a secret-flute cult use.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
- Table 1, row 135 (citing Glick 1972: 821-822); cf. Gourlay 1975: 50