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Both the people (ata) of Tana ’Ai and of Sikka, who inhabit the Regency of Sikka in east central Flores, refer to the past and, specifically, to myths of origin to explain the “sources” of the various groups which constitute their societies. The mapping of contemporary social organization onto events of the past and the invocation of mythic histories to explain the contemporary relations of social groups is significant in attempting to explain the apparent rank ordering of the social groups. Thus, in east central Flores, the legitimation of contemporary forms of social order is founded in contingent sequences of past events and it is with these representations of events, in history, that an analysis of hierarchy in Tana ’Ai and Sikka must begin. The result of such analyses is the specification of what Fox (1988:10-14) has termed “origin structures”.
Origin structures are the representations of history by which contemporary social organization is legitimated and explained. Both the Ata Tana ’Ai and the Ata Sikka possess myths in which these origin structures are encoded. In both representations, a principle by which society is ordered is precedence, the sequence in time in which the constituent groups of society were founded or in which they became members of society. However, because origin structures are dependent upon contingent events, they differ from one society to another. What is consistent in both Tana ’Ai and Sikka is the centrality of precedence, the interplay of dual divisions of authority, and the role of alliance and exchange in the representation of society. In this paper, I will be concerned with the different ways in which these features of origin structures have operated to produce different social organizations in Tana ’Ai and Sikka, two societies which are closely related culturally.
The mythic histories which recount the foundation of the Tana ’Ai domain of Tana Wai Brama are essentially the story of one clan, Sukun Ipir Wai Brama, whose ancestors, Hading Dai Dor and Uher La’i Atan, were the first people to find and settle the land of the domain. The stories of the subsequent arrivals of the ancestors of clans Tapo, Mau, Magé and Liwu, the lesser clans of Tana Wai Brama, are cast in relation to the temporal priority and social and ceremonial precedence of Sukun Ipir. The ngeng ngerang, “history”, of each subordinate clan establishes the legitimacy of the clan by tracing its obligations and prerogatives in the ceremonial system of the domain, its rights to land and its hadat (“customs”, “rituals”) to prestations by the ancestors of Ipir. The relations of the five clans to one another are thus founded, not on the reckoning of common origin or descent from a common ancestral line, but are represented as deriving from ceremonial alliances formed among people who were, originally, quite alien to one another. In this respect, it is proper to conceive of the domain of Wai Brama as consisting of peoples of five different nations joined in a confederation held together by a single ceremonial regime, what the people of Tana Wai Brama refer to as hadat. This regime is essentially that of clan Ipir, the founding, and hence pu’an (“source”, “trunk”) clan. The precedence of the clans of the domain is, as a consequence, strictly that whereby Ipir holds ultimate rights to the land, rights which over time were delegated variously to clans Tapo, Mau, Magé and Liwu. In all matters pertaining to hadat, Ipir is source and arbiter and, in ritual practice, is acknowledged as holding oda, “precedence”, over all others, even those to whom the right to perform a rite may have been delegated.
Each clan consists of a number of “houses”, the relations among which, in parallel to the order of clans in the domain, are ordered in terms of their precedence. The oda of houses within a clan is determined by the sequence of events in time by which the various houses were founded. Older houses are temporally closer to the source and thus take social and ceremonial precedence over more recently founded houses.