Throughout eastern Indonesia, the people of local communities trace their origins from diverse sources. Typically, the people of a community may be divided into a number of what can be called origin groups, each of which claims a unique origin from another place (often another island). In some communities, such as Sikka Natar and the Domain of Wai Brama on the island of Flores, these groups are ordered in rankings that appear to be social hierarchies, but which actually reflect the sequence in time in which each group’s ancestors arrived and joined the community. In Sikka Natar, major social groups called kuat wungung are so ranked with the first group claiming status as Source of the Earth, the group from which the ruling rajas of the old Sikkanese rajadom came claiming second position, and the remaining constituent groups of the village ranked in order of their ancestors’ arrival in Sikka. In Tana ’Ai, the five sukun (clans) of the Domain of Wai Brama each trace an independent origin from ancestors who came from other regions of Flores and from other islands in eastern Indonesia. As in Sikka, the sukun are rank ordered in the ceremonial system of the community in terms of their temporal precedence. In addition, the lepo (houses) of which a clan is composed are also rank ordered in terms of the order in time in which they were created through affinal exchanges between two clans. On Flores, as elsewhere in eastern Indonesia, the precedence of origin groups is the principle underlying and generating what is manifested as hierarchy within a contemporary society.

In the case of Flores, the royal house of Sikka Natar was linked over time by affinal alliance to other rajadoms on the island and on Sumbawa and Sulawesi. These links were essentially political and social, and not ceremonial, in nature. The ranking of the Sikkanese royal house in relation to others was established on the principle that wife-givers are superior to wife-takers and that the older an alliance, the greater its value. Thus, in contracting marriages with the ruling houses of other areas of Flores, the rajas of Sikka aimed to provide daughters in marriage to the sons of the rajas of Larantuka, Paga and Wolowaru while celebrating the antiquity of alliances in which they were wife-takers. Elsewhere on Flores (as in Tana ’Ai) analogous links between communities were (and still are) ceremonial in nature and not political. As ritual life reflects social precedence in these societies, it is likely that relations between such communities are also ordered in terms of precedence.^[6]

Two points of theoretical import arising from the analysis of the social orders of Tana ’Ai and Sikka are worth reiteration. First, the order of relationships which obtain among the constituent groups of society are extremely fluid and dynamic and operate in such a fashion that relationships of statuses of persons within these communities are also flexible and change to a significant degree through time. Second, the dynamism of Tana ’Ai society is paralleled by a conception of history, authority and power by which the perquisites of status are easily transferable between groups, except that one group is, in terms of the mythic origins of society, immutably the “origin”. In Tana ’Ai, that origin is represented by the Source of the Domain. Standing in a relation of priority to the Source of the Domain, however, is another veiled source which is represented variously as the women of the original clan (and the sisters of a Source of the Domain) and as the aboriginal spirits of the land. The same is true of the Rajadom of Sikka, in which the ratu was immutably the point of origin and reference for the reckoning of the social position of other groups in society. As in Tana ’Ai, prior to the ratu is a source of spiritual authority, the aboriginal Hokor people, who were usurped but whose spiritual authority over the land is recognized in the person of the tana pu’ang, the Source of the Earth. In both Sikka and Tana ’Ai, social order rests upon a conception of precedence by which power and authority are transacted among the constituent groups of society.