SCHOORL1997-001 - ethnographic monograph

Muyu

Indonesia - Muyu - Upper Kao-Digul - historic Netherlands New Guinea - Oceania - Sahul

Restricted

In the Muyu's primordial age — no more than five or six generations back, when the line between people and animals was not yet drawn — Kamberap turned himself into a pig, had himself trapped and shot, and ordered his body divided: the upper half became the sacred pig, men's meat eaten secretly in the forest, forbidden to the very women who raise the pigs. It was Kamberap who prescribed the mulin, the corded blade whirled until it growls, hidden from women and children. Its first sounding was cosmogonic: when the flood burst from the sacred plain of Mòtkòm, the people whirled the bullroarer against the rising water — and failed, and the escaping flood cut every river of the Kao country. To that same plain the Muyu dead return; and the mulin's growl is their voice, the grandfather and grandmother spirits come back to eat the sacred pork — or, at Kawangtet, the voice of Konki, the mud-covered spirit who ambushes boys at initiation.

bilah-geram (mulin atau áyerèt = sebilah kayu yang diberi lubang dan diberi tali; untuk diayunkan berputar-putar sehingga mengeluarkan suara)

bullroarer (mulin or áyerèt = a piece of wood with a hole and cord, swung round and round so that it makes sound)

Schoorl 1997, p. 169.

Object

Wooden blade perforated at one end, tied to a cord, and whirled in circles to make a grumbling sound.

Function

Hidden from women and children; whirled in the yawarawon pig-sacrifice and initiation. Its growl is the voice of the ancestral dead (Yibi) or of the spirit Konki (Kawangtet); in myth it was first whirled against the flood that formed the rivers.

Map confidence

medium - Woropko / Upper Kao-Digul anchor for the Yibi-version myth and wider Muyu ceremony accounts.

Source location

pp. 169, 177-79, 473, 479, 482

• Spirit voice
• Initiation rite
• Forbidden to women

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