PNG36 - ethnographic attestation
Rao
Papua New Guinea - Madang - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
The Rao live inland from Hansa Bay along the Ramu and Keram rivers, in the villages around Annaberg in western Madang Province. They enter the global record through a single line in K. A. Gourlay's 1975 survey of New Guinea's esoteric sound-makers, where his distribution table marks them as possessing all three of the region's restricted instruments - the bullroarer, the side-blown sacred flute, and the slit-gong. For the Rao the table records bare occurrence and nothing more: Gourlay reserves a separate symbol for instruments documented in initiation, and the Rao bullroarer does not carry it. Across the Ramu and the wider Madang hinterland the cult that surrounds these objects - the spirit voices, the male initiation, the screen of secrecy from women - is everywhere attached to the paired bamboo flutes and the garamut, not to the whirled slat, whose own role here goes unrecorded.
All are esoteric in the sense that the prerogative of playing them, at times even of seeing them, is restricted to one section of the community - initiated males.
Gourlay 1975:1 (Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society, New Guinea Research Bulletin 60)
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use; slit-gong occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer occurrence; function not stated.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_geocode
- Source location
Page references
Table 1, Madang area, map-point 36 (Rao); BR/SF/SG legend; Fig. 1 occurrence-vs-initiation key