PNG150 - ethnographic attestation
Gazelle: General
Papua New Guinea - East New Britain - Oceania - Sahul
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
On the Gazelle Peninsula — heartland of the Duk-Duk and Tubuan, the masked men's societies whose spirits police New Britain village life — the bullroarer holds no such office. When Richard Parkinson catalogued the region's instruments around the turn of the twentieth century, he found the whirled slat here only in the hands of children: a plaything with no secret name, no forbidden ground, no death owed by a woman who saw it. The awe belonged to the masks; the roarer, for once, was left to the young.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 150 records Gazelle-General bullroarer occurrence/use; named upstream pages were not recovered for a row-local gender or rite claim.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 150