The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG17 - ethnographic attestation

Avatip

Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Richly carved Schwirrholz from the village of Mụåńgêm on the Kaiserin-Augusta (Sepik) River, 140 cm — Reche read it as a display piece...
Representative image. Richly carved Schwirrholz from the village of Mụåńgêm on the Kaiserin-Augusta (Sepik) River, 140 cm — Reche read it as a display piece embodying the initiation spirit (H.S. 6596, Taf. LXV fig. 1). The middle-river region this record documents; not the row's specific Avatip object. O. Reche, Der Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss (Hamburg, 1913), Taf. LXV fig. 1 Public domain Image source

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

Avatip is the largest of the Manambu-speaking villages on the upper reaches of the middle Sepik, and Simon Harrison's study of it describes a graded men's cult through which boys and young men were initiated in successive stages, each stage taught more secret and more powerful ritual knowledge than the last. The whole system rested on concealment: the cult barred women entirely and, as Harrison records, involved the deliberate hoaxing and deception of women and children. The bullroarer's appearance at Avatip comes from Kenneth Gourlay's 1975 survey of esoteric sound-producing instruments and their role in male-female relations, where the village is logged as a site of both bullroarer and slit-gong use.

The male cult, like most such cults in Melanesia and elsewhere, debars women and involves the deliberate hoaxing and deception of women and children.

Harrison, Stealing People's Names: History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology (Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 5 "Male initiation"
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Table 1, row 17

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