Bellwood initiates the discussion of origins in relation to practice by pointing to the critical importance of what he calls a “founder-focused ideology”. This ideology includes reverence for ancestral founders, the naming of groups after them, and the ranking of positions in relation to such founders by which rights to land, labour and ritual prerogatives are derived. The general ascription of genealogically based rank in turn contributes to what Bellwood terms “founder rank enhancement” by which junior members of society are propelled to move out to establish their own senior founding position elsewhere, thus providing a strong motivation for exploration and expansion. This model, which Bellwood sketches, is concerned not just with single founders but “with successive and multiple founders” whose existence admits of a great variety of possibilities for tracing origins. History and its representation are crucial factors for this model and the complexity of cases to which it may apply.
Recognition of this complexity is Siikala’s starting point in his examination of chiefly relations among the island polities of ’Atiu, Ma’uke and Mitiaro in the Southern Cook Islands. Although the origin narratives of the Cook Islanders recount relations among the islands based on an opposition between elder and younger, which also distinguishes between gods and humans, a whole set of other oppositions involving gender and marriage are brought into play to support internal claims to succession among the chiefly lines on the different islands. Because islands have separate gender identities, a claim to succession on one island is based on the reverse criterion of a claim to succession on another.
In his succinct analysis of the complexity of relations among founders, Siikala also presents another epistemic theme among Austronesians: the tracing of relations by means of the notion of “path”. In such a notion, genealogy and journey merge — as do place and person in many Austronesian societies — to create both a spatial and a temporal narrative of social relationships. In this narrative, as Siikala notes, “precedence is determined in a recursive way, creating an overall hierarchy”.
In his paper, Sudo continues the consideration of origins in an examination of claims of origin among the matriclans of Satawal in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. The paper examines relationships among successive and multiple founders. Of Satawal’s eight clans, three are regarded as first settlers and are thereby accorded chiefly status; four clans are considered to be later arrivals and are thus accorded commoner status. One clan, although distinguished as the earliest of all the founder clans, is said to have surrendered its rights to the first of the chiefly clan. These relations encapsulate an order of precedence that acknowledges the transference of superiority from an autochthonous group to groups of incoming settlers. This same theme, in innumerable variants, is a recurrent founding myth for many Austronesian status groups (Sahlins 1985; Fox 1995b).
Sudo examines the complexities involved in these founder relations including claims to migrations from different directions, local and more distant tribute relations, an allocation of rights to the produce of land and sea. In Sudo’s discussion, as in Siikala’s, the idea of alternative modes of arguing rights, which are those of precedence, are indicated as a vital factor in determining local rank and status.
The papers by Sather and Yengoyan form a valuable pair in that both are concerned with societies that are characterized as egalitarian. As Sather shows, the value placed on autonomy and equality among the Iban do not preclude the pursuit of prestige and renown by enterprising individuals. As Freeman has phrased it: “… an individual had to be the source (pun) of his own achievement (1981:38). Nor do these values preclude the concrete representation of “an idealized world of precedence” in the alignment of visitors and hosts at ritual performances in a longhouse.
Yengoyan makes similar observations in regard to the Mandaya of Mindanao among whom precedence derives from a remembered past, while egalitarian values dominate domestic life. Formerly organized into territorial groups around a war leader known as bagani, the Mandaya required that each bagani who succeeded to authority had yet to prove himself by personal valour and daring achievements. The selection of all bagani was subject to popular scrutiny and physical confirmation. In contemporary communities where differences are minimized, the places associated with the origins and heroic actions of this bagani complex still provide “the emotional sustenance to what the Mandaya consider as their past”.
The subsequent four papers in the volume form a closely related set of essays that reflect shared understandings of notions of origin and their relation to the practice of precedence in a number of different societies in eastern Indonesia. The papers by Fox and Lewis are broadly comparative and concerned with a reexamination of ideas of alliance. Instead of focusing on exchange per se, Fox considers the “giving of life” implied by the kinship categories and botanic metaphors of origin that identify groups that exchange either women or men in various societies of the Timor area and on Flores. Instead of the categories of wife-giver/wife-taker, he adopts the terms progenitor/progeny (or progenitrix/progeny in the case of maternal groups that exchange males) to approximate, at an analytic level, an understanding of local native categories. He then examines the differences among progenitor or progenitrix lines in the various different societies as possible transformations within recognizable bounds. Lewis takes up Fox’s final case, that of the Ata Tana ’Ai, and considers in detail the internal precedence of its progenitrix lines. From this vantage point, he then compares the two closely related societies of the Ata Tana ’Ai and of Sikka, particularly in relation to the delegation of authority. In his analysis, he emphasizes the dynamism and fluidity of relationships and their representations as ordered by precedence.
Following on from Lewis’s paper, Vischer examines contestation in the order of precedence for the performance of ceremonies that both link and differentiate domains on the island of Palu’é, located off the northern coast of Flores. From among 14 small domains, Vischer focuses on a group of three domains whose relationship to one another is likened to the “three hearth stones” that support a single pot. Each of these domains has its own perception of its relationship to the other two based on categorical oppositions to one another. Successful performance of the major water buffalo sacrifice in one has the potential to alter this perceived relationship. With this as background, Vischer examines the specific performance of the all-important water buffalo sacrifice by one domain, Ko’a, and assesses its outcome internally as well as between the domains. The paper is a model of an event-oriented analysis of shifting precedence.
Finally, in this set of four papers, Grimes examines the remarkable configuration of origin structures on the island of Buru. Among the indigenous population of Buru, different houses or house circles (hum lolin) are comprised of several generations of related agnatic kin. Houses, in turn, make up a noro, which are the basic constituent units of Buru society. Unlike the cases discussed by Fox and Lewis, where precedence is applied both internally within house groups and also between allied “life-giving” groups, on Buru relations between the houses of a noro are structured on precedence based on temporal establishment. Relations between individuals within houses are structured on precedence based on relative age, but no precedence is recognized based upon marriage alliance, despite a discourse that conceives of the giving of women as the giving of life. Thus, what Grimes shows clearly is that similar forms of discourse on origins do not necessarily translate into similar practices of precedence.