PNG50 - ethnographic attestation
Wampar
Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
The Wampar, once called the Laewomba, hold the middle Markham Valley of Morobe, and Gourlay's 1975 survey of esoteric instruments in New Guinea lists them among the peoples credited with a bullroarer. The entry is a single line in a distribution table: no Wampar name for the object, and no account of the rite that used it. Their pre-contact religion is remembered mainly as a world of ancestor spirits, the mamafe, said to be everywhere but gathered in particular places; German Lutheran missionaries had reached the valley by 1911, and the men's secret business a bullroarer would have belonged to goes undocumented in the later ethnography. Among the neighboring Bukaua and Yabim of the Huon Gulf coast, the whirled slat was balum, the voice of the monster that swallows novices at circumcision, a word those peoples gave equally to the bullroarer, the monster, and the souls of the dead.
The word in the speech of the Yabim and Bukaua is balum; in that of the Kai it is ngosa; and in that of the Tami it is kani.
Frazer, Balder the Beautiful, vol. ii (1919), ch. 11
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer occurrence; function not stated.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
- Table 1, row 50