Every brother-sister pair in Tana Wai Brama is potentially the source of a new house. The socially reproductive potentialities of cross-sex siblingship are realized only when one of the pair, or both, marry someone of a different clan. A consequence of interclan marriage is the alienation of the brother’s “blood” from his own maternal descent group, since “blood” and descent group affiliation are transmitted from mothers to daughters only. When a man who was father to children in a clan other than his own dies, one of his daughters, who is a member of her mother’s clan, is returned to the father’s clan, wherein she becomes the founder of a new house. Intraclan marriages entail no such exchanges since the father’s blood remains within his clan, if not within his natal house. Thus each house in Tana Wai Brama traces its origin to a genitor (a father) of its own clan and a genitrix (a mother) of another clan. However, the genitrix, or ina puda, “ancestral mother” or “founding, original mother”, is the ancestor of greater importance whose name identifies the house. Thus all of her descendants through women are her pun and it might be said, for example: “Ami lepo é’i Dala pun”, “We of this house are Dala’s people (Dala’s descendants)”. While people who are descended from a named ina puda constitute a group, these groups themselves recognize common origins in a prior protogenitrix line which locates its ancestry and source in the line of the ina ama pu’an, the founding ancestors of the clan. For reasons I have outlined elsewhere (Lewis 1988:231-232, 309-310), the source houses and older protogenitrix lines of a clan tend to die out, but the proliferation in time of new houses allied to protogenitrix lines insures the continuation of the clan.

The people of each house also recognize, in addition to a genitrix, a protogenitrix, either by name or, more commonly, by reference to the living descendants of the protogenitrix. Protogenitrix lines are those which were generated directly from the origin line of the clan, that is, the direct descendants through women of the clan’s founding ancestors. It is through the links of genitor/genitrix and genitrix/protogenitrix that an Ata Tana ’Ai calculates a house’s origin and its relation to the founding ancestors. A clan in Tana Wai Brama is thus a good example of what Fox has called an “origin group”, that is, a group of people who:

claim to share and to celebrate in some form of common derivation. This derivation is socially constructed and may be variously based on the acknowledgment of a common ancestor, a common cult, a common name or set of names, a common place of derivation, and/or a share in a common collection of sacred artefacts (Fox this volume:132).

This point is important for the analysis of the society of Tana Wai Brama because it indicates that at the heart of the domain’s constitution is the idea that the domain’s clans are fundamentally social entities of independent and diverse origins, even though in contemporary times they are closely bound together by both ritual and affinal relations. It is nevertheless the case, however, that the principles which govern the generation and organization of houses within the domain’s clans are the same.