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
hevehe (west) / sevese-semese (east): the Gulf-coast word for the roarer and its whole secret sphere; in Keuru and Opau hevehe is the ordinary word for 'snake', which Williams judges the original sense. The roarer specifically is be'ure hevehe, 'ground-hevehe'. rubu: the central groups' name, 'a word which if repeated rapidly gives a good imitation of the sound'. tiparu: the eastern name (covering bamboo variants too); bukari: 'chief' — the clan owner who controls the instrument, or the instrument itself (Williams 1936b).
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: at the eastern end of the coast each clan's named bull-roarer had its bukari, its 'chief,' who could call up the monster to punish an affront — it stayed roaring in the village until the offender wiped out the offence with a pig. What the women were told they heard was an animal: at Keuru, where hevehe is the everyday word for snake, a snake was the only account ever given, and the men in the eravo were said to make the creatures howl by poking their tails with a stick. In the far-east Elema myth the instrument had been the women's first: two women fishing found the bull-roarer in the entrails of the slain crocodile-monster rubu, sounded it, and conspired to frighten the men with it, until the men captured it and made it the secret it has been since. Williams judged the women's ignorance 'fictitious' — the Vailala Madness had exposed the bull-roarers outright, yet when Arihava revived the cult in 1930 the women, to whom the instrument 'for the last ten years had been no secret but allegedly a jest,' hid themselves again in their houses or fled into the bush. 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
- Male secret-cult bullroarer of the whole Elema coast: represented to women and the uninitiated as snakes, lizards or crocodiles; sounded at initiation; and at the eastern end each clan's named major roarer is controlled by its bukari (bull-roarer chief), who calls it up to punish affronts until placated with a pig (Williams 1936b).
- Map confidence
- medium - alias_area
- Source location
- Table 1, row 98
- Snake-linked
- Forbidden to women
- Women-linked
- Female-origin myth