PNG66 - ethnographic attestation
Orokaiva
Papua New Guinea - Northern - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
umbubu English
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
umbubu = the bull-roarer of the southern Orokaiva, a thin slat of palm-wood swung during initiation (Binanderean; Northern/Oro Province). Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2nd ed., 2014); British Museum specimen Oc1906,1013.1448.
Among the Orokaiva, initiation placed children among the ancestral dead. Masked men in bird feathers and pigs' tusks burst from the bush and carried the novices off to a forest seclusion house, closed in on all sides, where they were told they had become spirits: they must not wash, and their world narrowed to the windowless dark. There they learned the dances and the sacred instruments whose voices belonged to the beings they would one day embody.
There the initiates are taught to play the sacred flutes and bull roarers that are represented as the 'voices' of the spirits.
Bloch, Prey into Hunter (1992), p. 9, on Orokaiva initiation after Williams 1930
- Object
- Gourlay's Oro Province bullroarer occurrence, now supported by PRM 1903.6.8 from the Kemuso/Kumusi River and carved PRM 1903.6.9 from the Yodda Valley; both are terminal-cord blades and neither museum record names a people.
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 66; PRM 1903.6.8 and 1903.6.9; PRM 1903 annual report
- Initiation rite
- Women-linked