PNG20 - ethnographic attestation
Niaura
Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
Niaura—Nyaura, the western branch of the Iatmul—names a people of the Middle Sepik who reckon descent from a great ancestral crocodile and figure in Kenneth Gourlay's 1975 survey of esoteric instruments and their place in men's secret cults. Among the Iatmul the bullroarer and the sacred flutes are heard as the voices of mythical and ancestral beings; the flutes were played in pairs, and after the death of an important man two flutists would sound through the night beneath his house. Boys taken into seclusion in the men's ceremonial house were taught to swing the bullroarer and play the flutes as part of their initiation, and the instruments were kept hidden in the rafters and the men's house, where women and children were forbidden to see them. A 1925 photograph from the Iatmul village of Korogo, in the Chinnery collection of the National Library of Australia, shows an initiate swinging a bullroarer.
The bull-roarer is an esoteric instrument that is stored in the men's house and represents the voice of a certain mythical being
Ammann, "Middle Sepik music and musical instruments in the context of Melanesia," Journal de la Société des Océanistes, p. 188 n. 8
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use. Supporting specimen: SMB VI 41596, a 93 cm painted wooden bullroarer from 'Lager bei Kaulagu', read here as historical Korogo (Western Iatmul).
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 20
- Initiation rite