PNG179 - ethnographic attestation

Buin (incl.Telei, Uisai)

Papua New Guinea - Bougainville - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

Whirled overhead on its cord, the flat blade the Buin of southern Bougainville call kagepai throws out a pulsing roar — a motion their language fixes in a verb all its own, pigu, "to brandish and twirl something around the head." The naturalist Otto Finsch logged the roarer here in 1914, standing beside the great wooden slit-gong. But the ceremony that gave the sound its meaning — who was gathered to hear it, who was kept from it — goes unrecorded in the sources that reach us.

kagepai n. Bullroarer.

Laycock, A Dictionary of Buin (ed. Onishi), Pacific Linguistics PL-537, ANU 2003, Buin-English dictionary p. 36 (headword "kagepai"); cf. English finderlist p. 267: "bullroarer kagepai", and verb entry pigu² "wave something in the air, brandish, twirl around the head (e.g. bullroarer)".

Object

bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use

Function

Gourlay Table 1 row 179 records Buin bullroarer occurrence/use and slit-gong occurrence/use; the cited Finsch page remains unrecovered.

Map confidence

high - geocoded

Source location

Table 1, row 179

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