Bullroarers that banned the chestnut harvest

mumumu

mumumu — the Wogeo bullroarer, which voices the bush lewa spirit-monsters (Hogbin 1970:59); lewa is also the word for 'mask'.

On Wogeo, an island off the Sepik coast, the secret instruments of the men's cult lent their voices to spirit-monsters: bullroarers spoke for the bush lewa, whose power was summoned at district food distributions, while paired bamboo flutes voiced the nibek of the interdistrict festivals. The flutes were made in longer "male" and shorter "female" pairs and played only by men. The fullest account of the island comes from Ian Hogbin, who titled his ethnography for the Wogeo men's custom of incising the penis to make it bleed, a self-induced bloodletting they reckoned the male counterpart to menstruation. When a headman planned a food distribution he could close a crop by conjuring the monsters: the bush lewa arrived embodied in bullroarers — mumumu — and their presence banned the picking of Tahitian chestnuts and other bush crops until, days before the feast, the taboo was lifted and the harvest gathered in. Marigum, the famous headman of Dap, once banned the chestnuts this way for a month to mark his youngest son's admission to the men's house. Men also swung them to lighten the haul when dragging logs.

If the crop is chestnuts, or another bush crop, then bush lewa, embodied in bull roarers, are summoned.

Rubel & Rosman, Your Own Pigs You May Not Eat (1978), p. 101, after Hogbin