In Tana Wai Brama, all rituals are celebrations of origins and the authority to conduct ritual is vested ultimately in the tana pu’an, the “Source of the Domain”, who is always a man of clan Ipir and who, as a living descendant of the founding ancestors of the domain, is responsible for the maintenance of hadat, especially in matters pertaining to the relations of people to the land. However, the tana pu’an rarely performs ritual himself. Rather, he delegates to others the performance of particular rituals, just as the ancestors of clan Ipir delegated land and rights in the ceremonial system to the lesser clans of the domain. Thus, each clan of Tana Wai Brama includes a number of ritual specialists, each of whom is a chanter who knows the ngeng ngerang, the mythic histories, of his clan and who is skilled in the conduct of ritual. As these leaders derive their authority in ritual from the tana pu’an, so too do they further delegate the actual performance of ritual to other men who, in turn, may delegate further, even to young boys. Such delegations of the performance of ritual are represented in terms of oda, “precedence”, such that whoever might actually sacrifice an animal in a ritual will say that he has been told to do so by someone else closer to the “source” of authority in the community.

Thus, with respect to the pragmatics of ritual performance in Tana Wai Brama, the Source of the Domain, the ritual leader of the community, delegates his authority to a hierarchy of ritual specialists who are thereby empowered to act, according to hadat on behalf of the Source. While the people of Tana Wai Brama locate the origin of the Source’s authority in the mythic origins of the domain, they also say that his authority to act in particular situations derives from his sisters. A good example of how this works out in practice is the sacrifice of animals in ritual. An animal is usually killed by a person who lacks authority in the ritual. This actor is empowered through delegation to kill the animal by a ritual specialist who, in turn, has received his power by delegation from a higher ranking ritual specialist, and so on. The concatenation of delegation originates with the Source of the Domain. What this means is that the person one sees doing something is the least likely person to claim the primary authority to be doing that thing.

In daily life, in the cycle of annual rituals and in the larger ceremonial cycles which are completed over a number of years, the delegation of ritual performance recapitulates and is modelled on the precedence ordering of social groups in the community, which itself derives from the precedence, the origin structure, of society as a whole. Similar conceptions of order and of the nature of authority and power are found in Sikka, which, despite possessing a culture closely related to that of the Ata Tana ’Ai, has had quite a different history.