No. PNG177
Siwai
Papua New Guinea · Bougainville · Oceania · Sahul
Function not recorded
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.
Particulars
- Function
- Not recorded.
Source
K. A. Gourlay, Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society: A Study of Esoteric Instruments and Their Role in Male-Female Relations (New Guinea Research Bulletin 60; Canberra and Port Moresby, 1975), Table 1, entry 177