PNG56 - ethnographic attestation
Tami
Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
kani Tami (Austronesian, Huon Gulf, Morobe, PNG)
spirits/souls of the dead; the same word names the bullroarer and the swallowing monster
Etymology. Kani primarily means the souls of the dead, the objects of Tami ancestor worship. The same word is extended to the bullroarer and to the monster who swallows the lads at circumcision, binding instrument, ghost, and monster into one. (high confidence)
On the Tami Islands of the Huon Gulf, the hum of the bullroarer was the voice of a monster that swallowed boys at their initiation and disgorged them as men. The Tami were one of four neighbouring peoples of northern New Guinea — with the Yabim, Bukaua, and Kai — who staged circumcision as a passage through this creature's body, and who used one word for both the swung instrument and the monster it spoke for; among the Yabim and Bukaua that word was balum. Frazer noted that in three of the four languages the same word meant also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the fourth, the Kai tongue, it signified 'grandfather.' Where the Kai made the novices file under a scaffold past a man who gulped water as each one passed, the Tami enacted the swallowing by marching the candidates past a row of men who held bullroarers swinging over their heads. The kani came to the Tami, they say, out of a woman's hands. On Boang Island a woman chopping firewood sent up a splinter that whirred as it flew; she took it home and showed her husband as a joke, he showed it to the men, and the men put a spell on her so that she died, and found him another wife. On Tami itself the find is washed ashore instead — a small piece of wood with a string still attached, picked out of floating driftwood. Bamler, who recorded both, thought the story no more than 150 years old and reshaped to fit Tami practice, and held that the kani cult itself had come from much further afield than Boang.
Among the Tami it is represented by causing the candidates to defile past a row of men who hold bull-roarers over their heads.
Frazer, The Golden Bough, "The External Soul in Folk-Custom"
- Object
- Wereldmuseum RV-746-38: a Tami Islands carved wooden bullroarer with lime designs, collected before 1889, 37 x 5.5 x 0.5 cm.
- Function
- Initiation instrument tied to boys' upbringing and ritual; sounded in numbers as the voice of the initiation monster kani.
- Map confidence
- high - representative anchor on the adjacent Finschhafen (Huon) coast; the Tami islets are too small to render
- Source location
Page references
Gourlay 1975 Table 1 row 56; Wereldmuseum RV-746-38; Frazer 1913 p. 301
- Initiation rite
- Forbidden to women
- Female-origin myth