The Bullroarer Atlas

No. PNG32

Serang

Papua New Guinea · Madang · Oceania · Sahul

Function not recorded

Printed plate of twenty numbered Astrolabe Bay Schwirrbretter and love-charm slats, carved with geometric patterns; eighteen stand upright and two lie horizontally below.
Plate I. Representative — not this record’s object. Twenty carved Astrolabe Bay Schwirrbretter and love-charm slats. Public domain · Image source

Serang is a coastal village in Madang Province whose people speak Takia, an Austronesian language that has been structurally remade on the grammar of the neighboring Papuan language Waskia. The village kept a bullroarer, alongside a sacred flute and a slit-gong; what the bullroarer was for at Serang, no one says.

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 32

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Part of The Bullroarer Atlas, companion to The Eve Theory of Consciousness.