Dukduk
Tolai · numen · Tolai traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
The Dukduk is the male masked spirit of the Tolai ceremonial society, the son and companion of the Tubuan. He appears in pairs as a towering cone of leaves surmounted by a face, his human bearer wholly hidden, and unlike the immortal Tubuan he is short-lived: each dukduk is made, danced, and destroyed within a single ceremonial cycle, so that his kind is forever dying and being born anew. He enforces the will of the society, collecting fines in tabu shell-money, policing conduct, and terrifying the uninitiated and the women from whom his nature is concealed. His name, a reduplicated form, is the source of the wider term by which the whole institution came to be known.
Parentage
- parent: TubuanThe dukduk is conceived as the son of the Tubuan.Frederick Errington, Karavar (1974) (secondary)
Domains
- initiation
- law and sanction
Powers
- police conduct and collect fines in tabu
- die and be reborn within each cycle
Relations
- parent: TubuanThe dukduk is conceived as the son of the Tubuan.Frederick Errington, Karavar (1974) (secondary)
Sources
- The Dukduk is the ephemeral male masked spirit of the Tolai ceremonial society, the son and companion of the Tubuan, made and destroyed within each cycle.: Richard Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Suedsee (1907) (primary); George Brown, Melanesians and Polynesians (1910) (primary)
- He enforces the will of the society, collecting fines in tabu shell-money and terrifying the uninitiated.: Frederick Errington, Karavar: Masks and Power in a Melanesian Ritual (1974) (secondary); A. L. Epstein, Matupit (1969) (secondary)