PNG21 - ethnographic attestation
Chambri
Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
Among the Chambri of the Chambri Lakes, south of the Sepik, the men's spirit house holds instruments kept hidden from women and the uninitiated: slit-gongs, flutes, and bullroarers, with the very origin of the ritual sound treated as a guarded secret. These are the people Margaret Mead studied in 1933 as the Tchambuli, reporting that the women did the fishing and trading and ran the practical life of the village while the men occupied themselves with art and ceremony. A widely told Sepik story holds that women once owned the secret flutes and the men took them away. Chambri boys are initiated with hundreds of incisions cut into the body, the wounding said to release the mother's blood that had gone into making them.
In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person.
Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
- Table 1, row 21