PNG73 - ethnographic attestation
Utuwala
Papua New Guinea - Milne Bay - Oceania - Sahul
Function not recorded
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
In K. A. Gourlay's 1975 survey of secret sound-making instruments across New Guinea, Utuwala in Milne Bay is a single line in his distribution table: a bullroarer and a sacred flute marked present, no use recorded, the entry resting on an unnamed student's report. Gourlay placed it within what he called the "Eastern Papua area of significant absence," a stretch of the Central and Milne Bay districts where the three esoteric instruments surface in only a scattered minority of places and nowhere carry cultic weight; for Utuwala, as for several neighbouring entries, no use was known at all.
all three instruments occur in a small minority of places. Nowhere, however, are their uses of sufficient importance in the esoteric field to undermine the general tendency.
Gourlay 1975, Sound-Producing Instruments in Traditional Society (New Guinea Research Bulletin No. 60), on the Eastern Papua area
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; sacred flute occurrence
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer occurrence; function not stated.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 73