PNG152 - ethnographic attestation
Tolai
Papua New Guinea - East New Britain - Oceania - Sahul
Play / practical
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
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
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 152 records Tolai bullroarer occurrence/use and slit-gong occurrence/use; no Tolai bullroarer women-taboo passage has been recovered.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 152