PNG171 - ethnographic attestation
Buka
Papua New Guinea - Bougainville - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
guev (also gueir) English
urar: at Buka Passage, the class of ancestor spirits, not the bullroarer itself — a person becomes an urar after death and joins the dead of the clan, often unrecognized until some untoward happening reveals it; the gueir bullroarer's sound is treated as the urar's voice, and the carved urar figures made for the wapi rite are burnt when it closes (Blackwood, Both Sides of Buka Passage, 1935). | guev: the Kurtatchi bull-roarer itself; wawiura: to sound it; inuts: the cord.
Etymology. In the Buka Passage and North Bougainville boys' initiation the whirled bullroarer is heard as the voice of the ancestral dead, the urar, sounded at the wapi ceremony, and each bullroarer bears the personal name of the ancestor it represents. Parkinson recorded a closely parallel North Bougainville institution, the ruk-ruk, whose spirits are the ruk — a male form, ruk a tzon, and a female form, ruk a tahol. (medium confidence)
At Kurtachi on Buka Passage, gueir bullroarers gave voice to named urar, figures of the dead made for the wapi initiation rite — the same word Beatrice Blackwood recorded for the ancestor-spirits themselves, of whom the dead become one after death, unrecognized until some untoward happening reveals it. The myth behind the rite tells of a woman who came upon a ruko, an urar, in the bush wearing its upe headdress, and traded her own small breasts for its heavy ones. Blackwood, who spent eighteen months there in 1929-31, persuaded young men to draw the urar and part with their bullroarers — spatula-like blades that rumbled low on a cord; some came to her unbidden with bunches of love-magic leaves to trade, taking away her cigarette butts and bandages for their leg ulcers. When the wapi closed, the carved urar figures themselves were burnt. The same upe headdress, modelled on the urar's own, is today the central emblem of Bougainville's flag. Blackwood also recorded how the gueir was got. A woman found it while chopping firewood and showed it to the other women; the men, learning that they knew, killed them all except some very tiny girls, and have kept it ever since.
She persuaded young men to draw pictures of the urar, the spirits of the dead, and acquired from them bull roarers – wooden, spatula-like contraptions that, when swung fast on a rope, made an ominous rumble.
Gordon Peake, "Beatrice's Bougainville," in Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation (ANU Press, 2022), ch. 10, p. 97
- Object
- Buka/Bougainville bullroarers include La Rochelle H.1590, a 54 x 9 x 1 cm terminal-perforated blade, and Kurtachi PRM 1931.86.177-.178, listed as gueir for the wapi ceremony. Blackwood brought home two specimens: one c. 25 in. long and c. 3 in. at its widest, the other 17 x 3 in., cut from the hard timber of the iwifi or torus tree and hung on ordinary twisted fibre string (inuts). Her text figure 8, 'Bull-roarer', is on p. 218.
- Function
- At Kurtachi, gueir bullroarers belonged to the wapi initiation complex; the roar voiced named urar figures made for the rite. (Blackwood, Both Sides of Buka Passage, 1935, pp. 194-241, 406-410, 483, 505-27). Blackwood is explicit that the instrument 'belongs exclusively to the wapi ceremony and has no other' use, and that each roarer is male and carries the personal name of the urar whose voice it is — she names Buwo, Upitomet and Tororon among those sounded at the wapi she attended. A roarer had to be bought with mun, the porpoise- and flying-fox-tooth currency, and several pigs. It also worked as a levy between villages: men would go by night and sound the roarer outside a neighbouring village of the group, whereupon that village had to bring out a pig and hand it to the bull-roarer party.
- Map confidence
- high - Village or district coordinate for the named people.
- Source location
Page references
Table 1, row 171; La Rochelle H.1590; PRM 1931.86.177-.178; PRM 1931 annual report | PRM 1931.86.177–178
- Forbidden to women
- Female-origin myth