The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG51 - ethnographic attestation

Kai

Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

An Eipo bull-roarer of the same small, weathered form, its twisted cords threaded through a pierced hole; not the Kai Ngosa documented here.
Representative image. An Eipo bull-roarer of the same small, weathered form, its twisted cords threaded through a pierced hole; not the Kai Ngosa documented here. Ethnological Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (acc. DE-MUS-019118/1478862/2020-04-07_13-28-50) Image source

Ngosa Kai (Papuan language of the mountains inland from Finsch Harbour / Finschhafen, Morobe, NE New Guinea)

grandfather

Etymology. Among the Kai, Ngosa means "grandfather," and the same word names both the monster who swallows the novices at circumcision and the bull-roarers swung to voice him. (high confidence)

Among the Kai, a tribe of mountaineers inland from Finsch Harbour, the bull-roarer was the voice of Ngosa, the monster who swallowed boys at circumcision. The Kai conceived male initiation as being gulped down and disgorged by this being, and one word, Ngosa, named the monster, the swinging bull-roarer that gave him his droning voice, and—where the neighbouring Yabim, Bukaua and Tami used their cognate words for a ghost of the dead—the grandfather. In the Kai enactment the trembling novices were led in single file beneath a scaffold on which a man stood; as each boy passed under, the man made a gesture of swallowing and let a gulp of water descend on him in a jet, and only then did the cut of the circumcision knife follow, afterward explained as the bite the monster gave in spewing the boy back out. The instruments themselves were lance-shaped pieces of carved palm-wood, kept wrapped up in the men's house, which no woman might enter, and only the old men had the right to undo the bundles.

It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful roar is represented by the hum of the harmless wooden instruments. Further, it deserves to be noted that in three languages out of the four the same word which is applied to the bull-roarer and to the monster means also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the fourth language (the Kai) it signifies "grandfather."

Frazer, The Golden Bough (Balder the Beautiful, vol. ii, 1913), ch. 67
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Table 1, row 51

View source Open this point on the interactive map