PNG152 - ethnographic attestation
Tolai
Papua New Guinea - East New Britain - Oceania - Sahul
Play / practical
Across much of Melanesia the bullroarer is a guarded voice of spirits, kept from women and children on pain of punishment. Among the Tolai of New Britain's Gazelle Peninsula it was the reverse: a child's toy, whirled for the noise, carrying no secret — and, as the trader-ethnographer Richard Parkinson noted in 1907, not even a name in the Kuanua tongue. The dread that elsewhere rides the roarer belonged here instead to the masked tubuan and duk-duk, ancestral spirit-figures of the men's secret society who appeared at initiations and funerals to enforce Tolai law.
- Object
- Both the bullroarer and the slit-gong are in use here.
- Function
- The Tolai sound both the bullroarer and the slit-gong (Gourlay 1975).
- Map confidence
- medium - Approximate anchor for the named people; no findspot given.
- Source location
Page references
Table 1, row 152; primary at Parkinson 1907 p. 138