PNG167 - ethnographic attestation
King / Kalil
Papua New Guinea - New Ireland - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
talun Lak (Siar-Lak), southern New Ireland
On the southern coast of New Ireland — then the German colony of Neu-Mecklenburg — the survey voyages of the gunboat SMS Möwe in 1904 turned up a bullroarer at the village of Kalil, recorded by Emil Stephan and Fritz Graebner and figured in their 1907 ethnography as a "Schwirrholz zum Dukduk": a bullroarer belonging to the Duk-Duk, the masked secret society of the Bismarck Archipelago. King and Kalil were small places; Kalil, the only village on this stretch where an exact count was made, came to thirty-one huts and seventy-eight people, and King had a bachelor house. Gourlay, cataloguing the instrument decades later, was unconvinced that it was native to the island: across New Ireland he found the slit-gong reported by every informant but esoteric secrecy almost nowhere, and he suggested the cult use of the bullroarer in the King and Kalil district was probably borrowed from New Britain, where similar masked dances are found.
Abb. 124. Schwirrholz zum Dukduk aus Kalil
Fig. 124. Bullroarer for the Duk-Duk, from Kalil
Stephan & Graebner 1907, Neu-Mecklenburg (Bismarck-Archipel), plate caption (Abb. 124)
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- high - representative on-land anchor at King / Kalil (regional coordinate fell just offshore of the rendered coastline); not an exact findspot
- Source location
- Table 1, row 167