PNG41 - ethnographic attestation
Ngaing
Papua New Guinea - Madang - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
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. Lawrence also recorded the instrument's origin myth: the deity Gab'me first hid a bullroarer in an old woman's net-bag, and she failed at every attempt to make it speak. He taught the secret instead to her grandson, in a dream, and from that division women kept only the right to see the unstrung wood — a plain piece of black palm — never to see or hear it swung.
- Object
- Both the bullroarer and the slit-gong are in use here.
- Function
- The bullroarer is in use here; no further detail recorded (Gourlay 1975).
- Map confidence
- medium - Approximate anchor for the named people; no findspot given.
- Source location
- Table 1, row 41
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth