The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG41 - ethnographic attestation

Ngaing

Papua New Guinea - Madang - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

A Bogadjim bull-roarer collected by Kapitän Rohde in the nineteenth century — a long, slender dark blade, its spear-point tip cut nearly free...
Representative image. A Bogadjim bull-roarer collected by Kapitän Rohde in the nineteenth century — a long, slender dark blade, its spear-point tip cut nearly free of the notched head, the fore-shaft banded with fine chip-carving. Bogadjim shares the Rai (Maclay) Coast with the Ngaing, whose own bullroarer has not been photographed. Übersee-Museum Bremen (D09862), coll. Kapitän Rohde CC BY-SA Image source

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

The Ngaing live in the mountains behind the Rai Coast of Madang, around the village of Sor, and were documented by the anthropologist Peter Lawrence, who placed the omnipotent figure Parambik at the head of their religious world. The bullroarer reaches this atlas not through a scene of its use but through Gourlay's 1975 catalogue of esoteric New Guinea instruments, where the Ngaing appear as one row in a region-wide table of men's-cult sound, paired there with the slit-gong. What is recorded is the instrument's presence on the Rai Coast, not the particulars of how it was sounded.

Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
medium - alias_area
Source location
Table 1, row 41

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