PNG96 - ethnographic attestation
Purari
Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
imunu viki English
Source term: bullroarer / sacred flute / slit-gong flags
imunu viki = "weeping spirit" (Purari/Namau), the local name for the bullroarer; kaiamunu = the wickerwork monster of the ravi (men's ceremonial house) whose voice the bullroarer is.
Etymology. Same Purari semantic package as the Maipua museum row: bullroarer as a weeping spirit voice. (high confidence)
In the Purari Delta of the Papuan Gulf, the bullroarer is the imunu viki, the "weeping spirit," and its roar is the voice of the kaiamunu, the great wickerwork monster kept in the rear of the men's ceremonial house. At the climax of initiation the kaiamunu swallows the boys and reissues them as men; F.E. Williams, the Government Anthropologist who worked among the Purari in the early 1920s, also recorded the slat at the funerals of important men, where its cry was a spirit's lament for the dead. The Gulf's story makes the instrument born of woman and stolen by men — but the telling belongs to the Ipi elders east along the coast, from whom Holmes finally took it down in 1924: the first bull-roarer was found inside the body of the slain god Oalea, the women claimed it and whirled it masked at a feast, and when the men saw through the disguise and seized it, the goddess Oripeu approved the seizure and laid a taboo on women using it from that day forward. Among the Namau themselves Holmes knew the uparu intimately — kept wrapped beneath the kevara, the cane effigies inside the holy place of the ravi — yet in all his years in the delta he could never obtain a Namau account of its origin, a gap he thought genuine, since the Namau loved to cap any story he told them. The instrument remained known only to initiated men; women and the uninitiated were kept from its sound.
Sometimes called imunu viki (weeping spirit), bullroarers were also played at the funerals of prominent men where the sound represented the cries of a spirit (imunu) lamenting the person's death.
Metropolitan Museum of Art curatorial summary of F.E. Williams, The Natives of the Purari Delta (1924), for the Namau imunu viki bullroarer (acc. 1979.206.1545 / 313768).
- Object
- Purari bullroarer concealed in the men's house or under the wickerwork monster; Gourlay also summarizes a Purari origin complex in which men seize the bullroarer and taboo women from using it.
- Function
- Spirit-voice/initiation/funeral bullroarer; women-linked origin/initial-possession complex and explicit taboo on women using it in Gourlay's source discussion.
- Map confidence
- high - geocoded
- Source location
Page references
Williams 1924, kaiamunu/ravi cult chapters (index s.v. kaiamunu, imunu, ravi, bull-roarer); funeral/initiation use of the imunu viki
- Spirit voice
- Initiation rite
- Death and rebirth
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked