The Mambai of East Timor provide an appropriate starting point for this analysis since the notions I wish to examine have already been brilliantly highlighted by Elizabeth Traube in her monograph, Cosmology and Social Life (1986) and particularly in her paper, “Obligations to the Source” (1989).

The Mambai constitute a population of approximately 80,000 living in dispersed hamlets in the mountainous area of east central Timor. The Mambai, who rely mainly on the swidden cultivation of maize, rice and root crops, do not have centralized villages. Hamlets consist of small groups of houses (fada) which function as minimal lineages. Houses are divided into a large number of cult groups (lisa) each of which shares a common cult house (fad lisa) and serves as the locus for ceremonial activity. These cult groups are in turn organized into a “great cult” (lis tu) whose house constitutes the “stem house” or “house of origin” (fada ni fun). Several great houses may share a single hilltop site with each huge house arranged in a circle around a round stone altar at the centre of which stands a three-pronged ritual post.

Various idioms are used to describe cult relations. Members of a great cult are elder/younger (kak-alin) to one another. The great cult house is “mother and father” (inan nor aman) and the lesser houses are its children (anan). Alternatively, these lesser cult houses are the “twigs” (snikin) established by a younger sibling who “plucks a leaf//breaks a branch”, selects a rock and a sacred object and sets out to found his own separate house. The scattered children of a great house are supposed to unite periodically at their “source” or “origin” (fun). The organization of this kind of origin group is traced through males and is supposed to be exogamous. These houses that recognize a common “house of origin” form a single “origin group” based on “genitor” lines.

Among the Mambai, each origin group recognizes two progenitor houses (or lines). Collectively, these primordial progenitors are referred to as umaen fun (lit., “male houses of trunk or origin”) or nai fun (lit., “mothers’ brothers of origin”). Alternately, these lines are distinguished as “mother water buffalo and father water buffalo” (arabau inan nor arabau aman). The “father water buffalo” designates the earliest progenitors; the “mother water buffalo” the subsequent progenitors. Together these progenitor lines are described as “those who support the rock//those who steady the tree”. As Traube makes clear, this botanic idiom is pervasive:

Symbolically, the original “trunk” givers of women are the source of all persons engendered in the wife-taking house, and they are linked through the daughters of their daughters to still other wife-taking houses. As the Mambai say of marital alliance: “Its trunk sits there. The bits of its tip go out again and again” (1986:86).

From the perspective of the progenitor lines, the lines they engender are referred to in various ways. In contrast to their own umaen fun (the “male houses of origin”), they are maen heua: lit., “new males”, a term which is the kin category for daughter’s husband (DH) and sister’s child (ZC). In opposition to their nai fun, “mother’s brothers of origin” they are the kai akin, “father’s sisters (FZ) of long ago”.

This primordial relationship between progeny and progenitor is described by the Mambai as “sisters since the base of heaven//brothers since the rim of earth” (tbo hoir lelo fun//nara hoir rai ehan). Here, too, there is the recurrent emphasis on category of fun: “base”, “origin”, “trunk”, “source”. Traube adds the important qualification for an understanding of nature of this primordial relationship:

If a man wants to marry a woman from an unrelated house, he must first ask ritual permission of his umaen-fun (“wife-givers of origin” or “trunk wife-givers”). He must pay his umaena for the seita nor aifa (“the torch and the fire”) to “light the dark path” as he searches for a wife among strangers (1980:353, n.10).

In this way, the primordial relationship of progenitor of origin is retained through the vicissitudes of changing alliances.