PNG5 - ethnographic attestation
Wogeo
Papua New Guinea - East Sepik - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
mumumu English
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: the lewa, whose power was summoned at district food distributions, and the nibek of the interdistrict festivals. Headmen sounded bamboo flutes, made in longer "male" and shorter "female" pairs and played only by men, to draw down the lewa's power. 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.
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
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; sacred flute occurrence; sacred flute use; slit-gong occurrence; slit-gong use
- Function
- Voice of the bush lewa spirit-monsters; a headman summoned them, embodied in bullroarers, to place a taboo on Tahitian chestnuts and other bush crops until the ban was lifted and the harvest gathered for a food distribution.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_geocode
- Source location
- Table 1, row 5; Hogbin 1970, pp. 58-59; Rubel & Rosman 1978, p. 101
- Spirit voice
- Women-linked
- Weather / fertility magic