PNG138 - ethnographic attestation
Kamano, Fore, Jate, Usurufa
Papua New Guinea - Eastern Highlands - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
obubugariye / pubunanune English
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
obubugariye (South Fore) / pubunanune (North Fore): 'humming sound; bull-roarer that makes a humming sound' — a single Fore word for both the instrument and its droning noise (Fore, Kainantu–Goroka family; the SE-Highlands member of this row). Graham Scott, Fore Dictionary (Pacific Linguistics C-62, 1980).
Etymology. Among the Fore of the Eastern Highlands, the bullroarer bears the same word as the humming noise it makes: Graham Scott's Fore dictionary glosses both obubugariye (southern dialect) and pubunanune (northern dialect) as 'humming sound; bull-roarer that makes a humming sound.' The instrument is named directly for its droning voice rather than for any spirit or being. (high confidence)
Among the Kamano, Usurufa, Jate, and Fore — four interrelated peoples of the Eastern Highlands whose secret-sacred life Ronald and Catherine Berndt documented in the early 1950s — the bullroarer and the paired bamboo flutes belonged to the men's cult, sounded out of sight of women and children, who were told the noise was the voice of a spirit. Their own myths held that the flutes had first belonged to women and were later seized by men, who have guarded them from women ever since; women were forbidden to see the instruments on pain of severe punishment. The Berndts set this within a wider field of earth-mother belief centered on the goddess Jugumishanta, identified with the earth, wife of Morufonu, and with him reckoned the parent of all things.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
- Table 1, row 138
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked