PNG140 - ethnographic attestation
Kurti
Papua New Guinea - Manus - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
On the north coast of Manus the Kurti kept three sacred sound-makers — the bullroarer, the sacred flute, and the log slit-gong — yet only the slit-gong's use was ever written down. The bullroarer itself slipped past everyone: Reo Fortune, who lived among the Manus islanders, recorded not one, and Gourlay, surveying the island decades later, could only call it “largely unknown.” And still it did not quite vanish — for it surfaces on a single ruled line of Gourlay's survey, the one mark that holds the Kurti bullroarer in the record at all: proof it sounded here, even though no one ever set down how it was swung.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 140 records Kurti bullroarer occurrence alongside sacred-flute and slit-gong marks; no row-local women or initiation passage is recovered.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 140