PNG97 - ethnographic attestation
Orokolo
Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
hevehe Elema (Orokolo), Papuan Gulf
Etymology. Hevehe is the common Papuan Gulf and Elema word for the bull-roarer. The term also names the cult's sea-monsters (ma-hevehe, "water hevehe"), the masks built to impersonate them (apa-hevehe, "drum hevehe"), and, among the Keum and Opau, "snake." (medium confidence)
Among the Elema of Orokolo, on the Papuan Gulf, the swung bull-roarer carried the voices of the ancestral spirits and warned women and the uninitiated to hide from the sacred procession; it was kept inside the great men's ceremonial houses, the eravo, some thirty metres long, and belonged to the same secret cycle as the towering hevehe and the conical kovave masks. Williams also records the Koraguba story in which Uravu, an old woman, made the first bull-roarer. In 1919 an old man named Evara, in a village near the Vailala River, fell into trances and prophesied that a steamer would bring back the ancestors and a cargo of European goods, setting off what became known as the Vailala Madness: the ancestors, he said, demanded that the old ceremonies be abandoned. In the eastern Orokolo villages bull-roarers and masks were dragged out of the men's houses and burned in front of the women and uninitiated boys from whom they had always been hidden. The government anthropologist F.E. Williams, who chronicled the movement and later wrote Drama of Orokolo, argued for the old ceremonies' preservation and worked to keep officialdom from completing their suppression.
Attached to a long string on the end of a stick and swung round the head, giving forth a loud humming sound, sounded to warn the women and children to 'clear' before a dance.
R. Hamlyn-Harris, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum II (1913), p. 38, on Queensland Museum E.13/219; cf. Williams, The Drama of Orokolo (1940), pp. 158-159, 204.
- Object
- Orokolo bullroarers include a plain RMCA wooden specimen and British Museum Oc1951,07.10, a Moreaipi/Elema board carved in relief with the ancestor pair Ivo and Ukaipu.
- Function
- Orokolo bull-roarer sounded as ancestral-spirit voice; used to clear women and children from processions; source also records Uravu, an old woman, making the first bull-roarer.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Gourlay Table 1, row 97; Williams 1940b pp.158-159, 204; RMCA MO.1965.64.12; Hamlyn-Harris 1913, p. 38, pl. XVII fig. 1
- Spirit voice
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth