PNG177 - ethnographic attestation
Siwai
Papua New Guinea - Bougainville - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
Among the Siwai of southern Bougainville's inland plains the bullroarer is simply present — one instrument in a soundscape the Siwai themselves filled with the enormous wooden slit-gongs of their feast-halls. What the whirring blade did there, and for whose ears, no one wrote down. The island's famous bullroarer cult — the roar as the voice of the urar dead, sounded to overawe the women — belongs to Bougainville's north; among the Siwai the blade keeps its silence.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; slit-gong occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay Table 1 row 177 records Siwai bullroarer occurrence and slit-gong occurrence; no row-local bullroarer use or gender passage is recovered.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Gourlay 1975, Table 1, row 177