PNG177 - ethnographic attestation
Siwai
Papua New Guinea - Bougainville - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
Schwirrholz = German for bullroarer (Frizzi's term). urar = North Bougainville term for spirits of the dead whose voice the bullroarer represents. wapi = North Bougainville ceremony at which the bullroarer is sounded.
Among the Siwai of southern Bougainville, the bullroarer is attested by Frizzi's 1911-12 fieldwork (figured and described in his 1914 monograph), which Gourlay later folded into his survey alongside the slit-gong. Frizzi records the instrument's presence and form but no specific use. The vivid Bougainville bullroarer cult — its roar the voice of the urar dead, sounded at the wapi rite to overawe women — belongs to Blackwood's northern peoples, not the Siwai, for whom function goes unrecorded.
- 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
- Frizzi 1914: 49-50 & fig. 69 (= Gourlay 1975 Table 1, row 177)