The Bullroarer Atlas

PNG73 - ethnographic attestation

Utuwala

Papua New Guinea - Milne Bay - Oceania - Sahul

Function not recorded

A long lance-shaped bull-roarer, its tip left plain red-brown while the lower two-thirds carry a lime-whitened carving — a round-eyed,...
Representative image. A long lance-shaped bull-roarer, its tip left plain red-brown while the lower two-thirds carry a lime-whitened carving — a round-eyed, tooth-mouthed face under a zigzag arch, trailing into chevron and dotted bands — with a hide cord tied through the blade and running down to the notched butt; shown for the general New Guinea type, not the Utuwala object or culture documented here. Science Museum Group (acc. A155755) Image source

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

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  • AwalamaPapua New Guinea - Milne Bay - Function not recorded
  • TaupotaPapua New Guinea - Milne Bay - Sacred / spirit
  • TopuraPapua New Guinea - Milne Bay - Sacred / spirit
  • Baluan IslandPapua New Guinea - Manus - Function not recorded
  • BarriaiPapua New Guinea - West New Britain - Function not recorded
  • BensbachPapua New Guinea - Western Province (Morehead) - Function not recorded