The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG52 - ethnographic attestation

Finschhafen

Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

Finschhafen bull-roarer (incised), Huon Peninsula, NE New Guinea — SMVK Museum of World Culture (obj. 12262).
Finschhafen bull-roarer (incised), Huon Peninsula, NE New Guinea — SMVK Museum of World Culture (obj. 12262). Museum of World Culture (SMVK), Gothenburg — CC0 CC0 Image source

balum Yabim (Jabêm) and Bukaua, Austronesian languages of the Huon Gulf, Morobe, Papua New Guinea

ghost, spirit of a dead person

Etymology. Among the Yabim and Bukaua, balum means "a ghost or spirit of a dead person," and the same word names the swallowing initiation-monster and the bull-roarer taken to be its voice; each Bukaua bull-roarer also bears the name of a particular dead man. (high confidence)

Among the Yabim, Bukaua, Kai, and Tami peoples about Finsch Harbour, on the south-eastern tip of the Huon Peninsula, the whirring of the bull-roarer was the voice of a monster called balum, and no boy ranked as a grown man until he had been circumcised by it. The rite was staged as a swallowing. A long hut, about a hundred feet in length, was built to represent the monster's belly, high at the head end and tapering toward the rear, with a pair of great eyes painted over the entrance and the projecting roots of a betel-palm standing for its hair. The novices were led inside to be devoured and, after their wounds healed, disgorged. The women and the uninitiated were told that the beast had swallowed their sons and brothers and would release them only for roast pigs, and the mothers fattened young pigs to redeem each boy from its belly. The instrument and the monster both bore the name balum, and the lodge where the novices were kept was the monster's house. The Neuendettelsau Lutheran mission, founded at Finschhafen in 1886, supplied much of the early record of the cult.

The bull-roarer as well as the monster bears the name of balum, and the building in which the novices are lodged before and after the operation is called the monster's house (balumslum).

Frazer, The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Vol. I (1913), Lecture XIII (the Bukaua of German New Guinea)
Object
bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence; slit-gong occurrence
Function
Voice of the monster balum in the Huon Gulf male-initiation/swallowing rite; women and the uninitiated kept from it.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Table 1, row 52

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