PNG154 - ethnographic attestation
Sulka
Papua New Guinea - East New Britain - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
vuvu Sulka (language isolate / non-Austronesian, Wide Bay-Cape Orford, East New Britain, PNG)
"Wind, to blow" — a motion-and-weather word; non-initiates hear the swung instrument as a spirit's voice (Geisterstimme).
Etymology. Vuvu means "wind, to blow" in Sulka — a motion-sound term fitting the whirled, air-roaring instrument, which non-initiates take for a spirit's voice. (high confidence)
The Sulka of Wide Bay, in East New Britain, are best known for their tall spirit-masks, built in secret huts deep in the forest by initiated men, and brought out at the rites that mark a boy's circumcision, a girl's ear- and nose-piercing, and a young man's teeth-blackening before marriage; women and children are barred from the making of them, and only boys are taught the knowledge behind it. The bullroarer here rests on slimmer ground. Gourlay's 1975 survey of esoteric instruments in New Guinea counts the Sulka among the peoples whose ritual life used such instruments, but no field account of a Sulka bullroarer actually in use is on record.
Um die Weiber zu warnen, wenn eine Maske in der Nachbarschaft ist, schwingt man das Schwirrholz, vuvu, und die Geängstigten, die darin eine Geisterstimme zu erkennen glauben, verstecken sich schleunigst.
To warn the women when a mask is in the neighbourhood, one swings the bullroarer, vuvu, and the frightened women, who believe they recognize a spirit's voice in it, hide themselves at once.
Parkinson 1907, "Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee," p. 636 (chapter "Masken der Sulka"); the original Fraktur is normalized to standard German above.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 154
- Forbidden to women