The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG16 - ethnographic attestation

Mundugumor

Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

A dark, carved New Guinea bull-roarer, its head end bearing a white-rimmed eye between notched jaws and a broad band of chain-like interlocking...
Representative image. A dark, carved New Guinea bull-roarer, its head end bearing a white-rimmed eye between notched jaws and a broad band of chain-like interlocking ovals picked out in white, the rest of the blade left plain; a general Sepik type, not the Mundugumor object documented here. Übersee-Museum Bremen (D09870) CC BY-SA Image source

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

Among the people Margaret Mead called the Mundugumor — the Biwat of the Yuat, a tributary of the lower Sepik — the great sacred instruments were long bamboo flutes capped with carved wooden figures (wusear), many bearing human hair and sometimes human teeth. The flutes were held to be the children of Asin, the crocodile-mother spirit, and their sound was the voice of that ancestor. During the rite that marked a flute's birth, a water drum stood for the mother crocodile, and initiates were made to crawl into the mouth of a large crocodile effigy to be swallowed and reborn. Gourlay's 1975 survey lists the bullroarer here alongside the flute and the slit-gong; it is the flute, not the bullroarer, that the ethnography of Mead and Nancy McDowell describes in detail.

These long flutes were considered to be the children of the crocodile spirit mother, Asin, and their sounds were believed to embody the voice of this ancestor spirit.

Bonhams, Biwat Sacred Flute Stopper catalogue note (citing Mead 1935; McDowell 1991)
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
medium - alias_geocode
Source location
Table 1, row 16

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