In both Tana ’Ai and Sikka, the dynamics of social organization, whereby new social groups are created within society and alien groups are incorporated, produce a social order which is represented in terms of its origins.^[4] The tracing of contemporary social relations is structured just as the processes of generation are orderly and origins themselves are structured. By reference to their origin structures, the members of a community maintain the continuity of society as it changes. Indeed, it is upon change that origin structures are predicated. In all cases and at every level of social life, from the ideological to the immediately pragmatic, the origin structures of Tana ’Ai and Sikka allow for the transaction of authority. Thus origin structures can be mapped by tracing the authority structure in a community at a given time.

In both societies, just as no group claims an autochthonous origin, no group or person claims innate authority to act. Rather, all authority is traced to a source and, except in the cases of the tana pu’an of a Tana ’Ai domain and the tana pu’ang of Sikka, a person acts or exercises power legitimately, i.e., in accord with hadat, only if the authority inherent in the act has been delegated by another person closer to the source in a chain of precedence.

Precedence systems are multiplexly asymmetric and open ended, which is to say that new groups can be generated and power delegated endlessly. It is only at the source that problems of a conceptual or logical nature arise. In Tana Wai Brama, for example, the tana pu’an holds his authority by virtue of his membership in a group whose members are descendants of the first of the ancestors to settle in the domain. Even so, the power and authority of those ancestors was not simply a consequence of their priority of immigration and primacy of precedence, but derives from an act of usurpation — of land, power over animals and ritual potency — of the aboriginal spirits of the domain (cf. Lewis 1988:270-274). Similarly, the authority of the ratu of Sikka derives from the usurpation of Sikka Natar’s aboriginal inhabitants, whose descendants are, even today, recognized as the tana pu’ang. That authority is represented as having been delegated by the tana pu’ang, who retains ritual authority over the land and it is upon this delegated authority that the ratu’s legitimacy is founded.

In both societies, authority and power are linked in such a way that authority is prior to power. So, too, the person who holds authority is prior to and holds precedence over the person empowered to act. Thus, in both Tana ’Ai and Sikka, there is a principle of delegation by which those who hold authority delegate to others the power to act.

Such delegation can be seen in the relation of the tana pu’ang of Sikka and the ratu. The Source of the Domain had ritual or religious authority over all the land of Sikka and its people. In the myths of the foundation of the domain, it is told that the Source of the Earth delegated to another person the power to act. That second person became the raja. Even in Sikka today, one finds a division of authority and power, the Source of the Domain, the hadat leader, exercising spiritual authority in the community which, over the years, has been delegated to the raja. In the process of this delegation, the Source’s spiritual authority is transformed into secular, political power. This pattern, by the way, is so common in eastern Indonesia, that anthropologists use the term diarchy (rule of pairs) to describe the organization of sacred power and secular authority in all eastern Indonesian societies.

The Sikkanese rajadom was abolished in 1954 and by the 1960s the secular power of the raja was transferred to the local Bupati and the officials of his government. But to the people of Sikka, the basic division between authority and power has been maintained continuously in an unbroken sequence from the past.

Similarly, in Tana ’Ai, 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. The Source himself, it is interesting to note, derives his authority in turn from his sisters.

To an English speaker, authority is (1) the power to influence or command thought, opinion or behaviour and (2) an individual cited or appealed to as an expert. Both of these definitions hold well enough for persons who have kuasa, newang and hak (Sara Sikka and Sara Tana ’Ai; note that kuasa and hak are cognates of words in Bahasa Indonesia), “power”, “authority”, “obligation”, “right”. People in both societies recognize authority both as influence to command thought, opinion or behaviour and as something characterizing an individual who is cited or appealed to as an expert of some sort. Such authority and authorities as persons command and influence only locally and on the basis of hadat. This means that authority is an aspect of hadat. And hadat is the “source” or “origin” of the community itself. One finds this relationship between origins and authority expressed in local mythic traditions, the myths handed down from the ancestors which serve as charters for the way things are and ought to be and which recount the creation, not only of the world, but of the social order. These are foundation myths which are cited as the authority for the way things are today. Thus things are the way they are today because that was the way they were in the past.

One of the practical corollaries of this division between authority and power and one of the practical results of the principle of delegation is that, in societies such as those of Timor and Flores, the person seen to do something, the person apparently empowered to perform an act, is not the person who has the authority to get the thing done.^[5]

In the time of origins (or before the time of origins), authority and power are not separate but are monadically combined. In the creation of the social order, the two were separated, resulting in a dual division (Figure 6). In some societies, such as Sikka, the tana pu’ang, “Source of the Earth”, once held all power. In Sikkanese myth, Don Alésu went to Malacca and there acquired agama (Christianity) which he carried back to Sikka. Agama (a foreign religion) enabled the establishment of the Sikkanese rajadom, but only after the delegation of power from the tana pu’ang to the ratu. Through this delegation and division of authority, the ratu acquired power and a diarchy was created. The tana pu’ang, who still held (and holds) authority, retired to the background: as source, he holds authority, but not power. The ratu, in turn, further delegated power to the mo’ang pulu, the “ten lords” or nobles of Sikkanese society who are themselves ranked in terms of their precedence with respect to the acquisition of power from the raja. Thus, with respect to Sikka, the general separation of authority and power must be rewritten to take into account the specificities of Sikkanese history and culture as in Figure 7.

Two important points must be noted. First, the relations of the mo’ang pulu and the ratu appear hierarchical, as, with respect to power, they indeed are. However, this apparent hierarchy masks as essential heteroarchical diarchy between sacred authority and secular power, the relationship of which is as much complementary as hierarchical. Second, the principle which governs the apparent hierarchy is not one of gradations of an absolute power. Rather, in delegating power to the mo’ang, the ratu holds relative authority over them. The same relationship of authority to delegated power holds for the relationship of each pair of mo’ang as well. Thus at every level of the apparent hierarchy, what Fox (1989:52) has called recursive complementarity governs the structure of relationships. Thus, the relationship of the tana pu’ang to the ratu is one of authority to power; the relationship of the ratu to the highest ranking mo’ang is one of authority to power; and the relationship of each higher mo’ang to the next lower ranking mo’ang is one of authority to power.

In Tana ’Ai, the same basic principle works out in a different way. Tana ’Ai never had a raja and there is not the division of the sacred and the secular as we find in Sikka. The system is not, in other words, diarchical in the sense that the term describes the case of Sikka. Yet Tana ’Ai manifests a similar pattern. In the myths of origin of the Ata Tana ’Ai, the time before the creation of the social order was a time in which the major categories of later creation were monadically whole. But the idiom is one of life and death and male and female. In the precreation epoch, there was no death and there was no sex; human beings neither died nor were created through sexual congress and the firmament and the earth were connected. When the earth and sky were separated, male and female came into being as did the living and the dead. As humans came to be divided as male and female, so too did society come to be divided into clans, one of which, the founding clan, is temporally prior to the others. That is the clan of the tana pu’an, the “Source of the Domain”. The Source of the Domain is the ultimate authority in social life and combines in his being both authority and power. However, as in Sikka, the creation of the social order required the delegation of authority as power. The Source of the Domain thus empowered the lesser clans which are themselves ranked according to the principle of precedence (Figure 8).

Once again, the tana pu’an delegates authority which becomes, through delegation, power and each ata wu’un is related to every other ata wu’un as either the delegator of prior authority or recipient of delegated power. The classificatory system at work is governed by complementary recursivity and not by absolute hierarchy. The pattern is set in the mythic histories of the domain, in which each clan received rights to land and the performance of ritual from the tana pu’an. The sequential order in which the tana pu’an delegated specific rights establishes the precedence of the clans. Today, those original relationships are refracted in the order of rights manifested in the performance of particular rituals. The power to perform is a function of those at the end of the chain of precedence; the earlier the precedence, the less active ritual practitioners are.

A single model can be extracted from the Sikkanese and Tana ’Ai cases (Figure 9).