Michael Young, in his account of Goodenough Island (Young 1971), describes the origin structures of the Kalauna: the separate emergence of a succession of eight clans; the establishment of pre-eminence by the second of these clans based on a knowledge of the generative rituals for the main foodstuffs; the split within this clan; the sharing and assignment of tasks to the other clans; and, finally, the account of the various events that led to the scattering of some clans and the “journey” or migration of the others from their place of origin to the present settlement, most of which, as Young explains, is told by the pre-eminent clan itself.

This account begins with multiple origins, assigns an order of precedence among the clans and pre-eminence to one clan whose internal divisions are thereafter significant. In Young’s phrase, it designates the “competences” of the clans and recounts the vicissitudes of their journey through various places to the present. Each clan recounts its separate origin narrative; only the account of the pre-eminent clan contains the information that links the separate accounts to one another and explains the origins of the principal exchange institutions of the society. Finally, to the public account of each narrative is attached an esoteric component that reveals to its members alone the magical formulae of the group. These accounts, which are of evident importance to the Kalauna, are — even in their ambiguity — paradigmatic of the sort of narratives that establish an Austronesian “origin structure”.

Compare these narratives of origin with those of several other societies from different parts of the Austronesian world. In a recent ethnography, E. Douglas Lewis (1988) presents the narratives of origin of the Ata Tana ’Ai of east central Flores. These narratives are immensely complex and detailed and Lewis devotes twenty-five pages of his ethnography to outline their basic structure. They form the foundation of the domain of Wai Brama and must be recounted in ritual language at the principal ceremonial celebration of the domain. The rituals speak of a community of “ten clans plus”, although in fact there are twenty-five separate clans resident within the domain.

Each clan recounts its separate origin and its particular journey into Tana ’Ai. One clan — in Lewis’ words, “the source clan” —is pre-eminent. This clan possesses the narrative that integrates the other clans to it. As among the Kalauna, this clan’s “history” is especially complex because its own internal division is of great significance. For the source clan of Tana ’Ai, this internal division is an ancestral elder/younger bifurcation represented by critical differences encountered in hunting together. On arriving in Tana ’Ai, the elder of the brothers assigns precedence to the ancestors of the other clans as they, in turn, arrive; the younger brother marries with these ancestors and shares out ceremonial goods and ritual duties. An ambiguous third ancestor who accompanies the two brothers at the outset takes a divergent journey and finally arrives in Tana ’Ai to become the founder of the lowest clans of the domain.

To quote Lewis: “The people of each Tana ’Ai clan conceive of themselves as making up a group by virtue of descent from ancestors named in the histories, who were the first people of the clan to arrive in the various localities occupied by the clan … Furthermore the Ata Tana ’Ai say that each of their clans originated from a different place. Thus the histories serve to identify each clan in terms of its origins and to distinguish each clan from every other clan” (Lewis 1988:61).

Like the narratives of the Kalauna but in a more elaborate fashion, the histories of Tana ’Ai serve as the charter for the society’s origin structures. In the case of the Kalauna, these structures encompass a single settlement; for the Ata Tana ’Ai, they encompass a region that forms a single ritual domain. Instances of similar narrative accounts of origins could be cited from the ethnographies of the Timor area (Renard-Clamagirand 1982; McWilliam 1990) or from Roti where such narratives establish a class system with all of the prerogatives of rule and authority. It is more instructive to consider another example, typical of its kind, where similar narratives are told at a more individual level.

The case of the Ilongot, a small-scale hunter-horticultural population in Luzon, may be taken for present purposes to represent a class of Austronesian societies often distinguished by their lack of clans or lineages from societies like the Kalauna or Ata Tana ’Ai. The household group is important in all these societies but a further scaffolding of relations is seemingly less elaborate among the Ilongot. The idiom of relationship, however, is articulated in a similar fashion.

Among the Ilongot, each household is regarded as “one trunk” (tan tengeng). These “trunks” form local clusters generally denoted by the names of rivers or other prominent features of their environment. The boundaries of these settlements and the affiliation of households within them is flexibly interpreted. But in each settlement, according to Michelle Rosaldo,

there is at least a core group of closely related families who are apt to share a history of common residence, having lived in close proximity over years of intermittent movement in search of fertile lands, abundant forests, or freedom from lowland law. It is this history of coordinated moves, through times of inward-turning “concentration” and then “dispersal” toward the lowland margins of Ilongot lands, that lends a settlement its viability as an ill-defined yet generally recognized and cooperating social group (M. Rosaldo 1980:5).

Like the Kalauna and Ata Tana ’Ai, Ilongot also possess origin narratives that relate journeys of the past. Although they focus mainly on the recounted memories of their oldest living members, these narratives nevertheless articulate two distinct levels of origin. Again to quote Michelle Rosaldo:

A history of related moves, interpreted in an idiom of bilateral kinship and reinforced by bonds of marriage, permit most members of a settlement to construe themselves as kin, who (as Ilongots express it) share a “body” (betrang) … What continues over time is not a stable group but a tradition of relation (M. Rosaldo 1980:9).

Here kinship is constituted by a shared journey which includes hunting together. A tradition of such shared relationship points to still earlier origins.

Those people who have shared in hunts, along with kin in other settlements with whom they have been wont to live at times of “concentration”, will tend to see themselves as members of a single bertan … Bertan, unlike settlements, are seen by Ilongot as timeless and discrete collections of related persons who share an origin from unknown common ancestors who once lived together “downstream”, “in the lowlands”, “on an island”, “near a mountain” —in short, in some environment from which the bertan takes its name (M. Rosaldo 1980:9).

Ilongot society is composed of at least thirteen such discrete, named, and loosely localized groups. Seen from a perspective of origin structures, there is little formal difference between the Ilongot, the Kalauna or the Ata Tana ’Ai except in the way in which each of these societies reckons its path of origin through the father in the case of the Kalauna, the mother in the case of Ata Tana ’Ai or through either parent in the case of the Ilongot. In all of these societies, the sharing of a journey is part of the reckoning of social ancestry. This reckoning is enhanced by the recurrent linguistic use of terms for “path” as a common Austronesian metaphor for social relationships.

In comparing these societies, one crucial difference needs to be pointed out in the case of the Ilongot. All the bertan of the Ilongot recount their own separate narrative of origin; no member of a bertan recites a narrative that links the bertan to each other as a group.