The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG59 - ethnographic attestation

Busama

Papua New Guinea - Morobe - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

One of a group of carved New Guinea bull-roarers photographed together for the Hospice Saint-Roch collection: a dark forked-tip blade with a...
Representative image. One of a group of carved New Guinea bull-roarers photographed together for the Hospice Saint-Roch collection: a dark forked-tip blade with a chevron-and-spiral face pattern in white; shown for the general type, not the Busama object or culture documented here. Museum of the Hospice Saint-Roch (acc. #CM:0875504) Image source

balum English

Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags

Bukaua/Yabim word that names at once the bullroarer, the souls of the dead, and the monster that swallows boys at initiation

Etymology. Among the Bukawa and other Huon Gulf peoples the single word balum names at once the spirit-monster whose voice is the bullroarer and which 'swallows' and 'regurgitates' the initiation boys, the bullroarer itself, and the soul (katu) of a dead ancestor. (high confidence)

Busama is a large Bukawa-speaking village on the south coast of the Huon Gulf, in Morobe Province, where Ian Hogbin did his fieldwork after the Second World War and published it as Transformation Scene (1951). The Bukawa belong to a cluster of Huon Gulf peoples — with the Yabim, Kai, and Tami — for whom one word, balum, names three things at once: the bullroarer, the souls of the dead, and the monster that swallows the boys at circumcision. At initiation the novices were said to be devoured by this monster, whose roar the women and uninitiated heard as the humming of bullroarers swung by hidden men; after pigs were sacrificed the creature was induced to disgorge them, and the bites and scratches it left behind stood for the circumcision wound. Among the Bukawa each particular bullroarer bore the name of a particular dead man. The entry comes to the atlas through Gourlay's 1975 survey of sound-producing instruments, which logs Busama as a site of both bullroarer and sacred flute.

the tribal initiation, of which circumcision is the central feature, is conceived by them, as by some Australian tribes, as a process of being swallowed and disgorged by a mythical monster, whose voice is heard in the humming sound of the bull-roarer.

Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged ed., 1922), ch. 67 "The External Soul in Folk-Custom"
Object
bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use; slit-gong occurrence
Function
Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
Map confidence
high - geocoded
Source location
Table 1, row 59

View source Open this point on the interactive map