PNG98 - ethnographic attestation
Elema: General
Papua New Guinea - Gulf - Oceania - Sahul
Restricted
hevehe Orokolo (Eleman family; Western Elema, Orokolo Bay, Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea)
Source term: hevehe 1
Among the Elema of Orokolo Bay, on the long Gulf of Papua coast, the whir of the bullroarer was held to be the voice of imunu — ancestral spirits dwelling in the bush and the back-country swamps, each clan tied to its own, fixed to particular places in the rivers, sea, and land. The instruments were kept in the eravo, the great men's houses that ran some thirty metres long and stood fifteen metres tall, and were never to be seen by women or the uninitiated; when a bullroarer sounded, it warned women and the uninitiated to hide out of the way of the procession of sacred objects, which were thought to harm them if seen. Authority rode on these objects as much as ritual did: a clan's chief, the bukari, drew his standing to halt a quarrel and force a settlement from his control of the clan bullroarer. The Elema were the people whose vast hevehe masks and ceremonial cycles of up to twenty years F.E. Williams recorded between 1923 and 1937, and it was Williams who argued the Papuan administration out of suppressing the bull-roarer cult in the Gulf.
His greatest coup, perhaps, was to prevent the suppression of the 'bull-roarer cult' in the Gulf of Papua.
Michael W. Young, 'Williams, Francis Edgar (1893–1943)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 12, 1990
- Object
- bullroarer occurrence; bullroarer use
- Function
- Gourlay source-catalog row with bullroarer use in PNG/Melanesia.
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 98
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked