PNG33 - ethnographic attestation
Basken
Papua New Guinea - Madang - Oceania - Sahul
Sacred / spirit
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
Basken is a village in the Sumkar District of Madang Province, on the north coast of mainland New Guinea. It appears in K. A. Gourlay's 1975 survey of esoteric sound-producing instruments as one of the places where the bullroarer was recorded alongside the sacred flute and the garamut slit-gong. Gourlay's study is built around the role such instruments played in male-female relations: across the societies he surveyed they were a monopoly of initiated men, kept from women under threat of penalty. Beyond its bare placement in his table, no local name for the bullroarer or account of its use at Basken is set down.
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; 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 33