Precedence as an expression of hierarchy occurs as cultural categories based on kinship, taxonomic structures of fauna and flora, and in certain aspects of religious and political structures and symbols which deal with the idea of origin and place. In analyzing the structure of the bagani complex; the link to the past as manifest in deeds, locality and origin is established in and through genealogical depth and the meaning of genealogy through history and myth. The basis of hierarchy is where the origin of events and places are established through a sense of time.

This system of structured inequality, which is the basis of political process, is contrasted with various local level activities and organizations of networks which emerge as egalitarian frameworks based on the sharing of food, commodities and activities. The articulation of local and regional activities is highly visible when one calculates how human resources are moved over the landscape as a means of economic exploitation. Domestic units such as household, family and hamlet require mobility which is paramount and vital for economic activities. Under the bagani system, most movements were within the domain boundaries, but since the 1940s movements have been more far-reaching.

The articulation of egalitarianism on the local level and precedence on the political level is achieved through a common concern for the validation of origins as they relate to the past. These centres and places of origin are not only spatially delimited, they are also expressed in primary events and actions in which the deeds of past heroes and bagani are understood as an ongoing historicity which confirms and ratifies status and rank.

Although the bagani political structure is no longer a system of action, it still remains the central key linkage with the past and with religious symbolism which sanctifies the past as mythic threads linking the sky and the underworld. Again, the natural landscape encodes origins and events as semi-sacred based on the deeds of a heroic past which is now entering a period of endangerment.

Origins as the expression of precedence and egalitarianism as value present an interpretation of society and a cultural logic which moves away from a unified coherence, one in which all the strands of society work in a collective and harmonious manner. This kind of dual structure is based on the imperative quality that origin cannot be reduced to egalitarianism and, in turn, a system of local level equality is established and maintained by limiting rank and status differentiation to those realms of cultural institution which will not impinge on daily life.