PNG38 - ethnographic attestation

Astrolabe Bay

Papua New Guinea - Madang - Oceania - Sahul

Sacred / spirit

On the coast of Astrolabe Bay, where the Russian Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay landed in September 1871, learned the Bongu language, and became the first European to do extended fieldwork in the region, the men voiced spirits through sound. Adult men blew paired long bamboo flutes, one male and one female, to make the cries of spirits for ceremonies in the coastal villages near the Ramu River, alongside the garamut slit-gong, shell rattles, and hourglass hand drums. Maclay's own list of Bongu instruments named the signal gong barum, the hourglass hand drum okam, the signal seashell, and the bamboo flute. The ritual life of the coast centered on carved ancestral figures called telum, monumental images of male and female forebears that each bore a name, were displayed at ceremonial feasts, kept in the men's meeting houses, and figured in the initiation of boys. The bullroarer is recorded here in K. A. Gourlay's 1975 survey of New Guinea sound-producing instruments.

Sacred flutes are blown ('Windim Mambu') to make the cries of spirits by adult men in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea. Pairs of long bamboo male and female flutes are played for ceremonies in the coastal villages near the Ramu River.

Ragnar Johnson & Jessica Mayer, liner notes to Sacred Flute Music from New Guinea: Madang / Windim Mambu (recorded 1976)

Object

SMVK 1901.21.0431 is a bundle of five wooden Balom bullroarers from Astrolabe Bay, each a cord-through-one-end free-air blade, stored with a leaf bundle and wooden sistrum.

Function

Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.

Map confidence

medium - representative on-land anchor at Astrolabe Bay (regional coordinate fell just offshore of the rendered coastline); not an exact findspot

Source location

Table 1, row 38; SMVK 1901.21.0431; catalog p. 136

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