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. Oalaia, pursuing his eloping daughter in the guise of a child-swallowing monster, was killed, and the bullroarer was found in his belly. In the Namau telling, the girl — the "mother" of the bullroarer — resolved to keep it for the benefit of women, and with her sister put on a mask and took it out to frighten the men; but the men knew them, "because only women swing their buttocks in that fashion when they dance," and seized the instrument, and the divine woman Oripeu approved the seizure and laid a taboo on women using it from that day forward. 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
- 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
- Female-origin myth