The Atoni are a large and distinct ethnic population of more than 750,000 people, who inhabit more than two-thirds of West Timor. They refer to themselves as the ‘people of the dry land’ (atoni pah meto). Land (pah) is primary in their definition of themselves and in a great number of Atoni titles: Atau-pah, Ana’-pah, Afen-pah, Abain-pah. Like the Rotinese, they have a long history of European contact. They have been subject to longer and more intensive contact than the Rotinese with both the Portuguese and the Dutch. Their political formations date back to a period well before the coming of the Europeans (Fox 1988) and although there are similar patterns of political structure among the Atoni states or domains, differences among these states are greater than among Rotinese domains. For the purpose of this paper, I draw comparisons between Termanu, the largest domain on Roti and Amanuban, the domain that became the dominant Atoni state in West Timor for a significant period during the 18th and the 19th centuries.

One of the chief differences between the Rotinese and the Atoni is in the structures of their origin groups. Atoni origin groups are known as kanaf. Each kanaf designates a named clan group, all members of which bear the same name. Members of a kanaf claim the same origin and are said to derive from the same source, whose site is (or is regarded as) a physical location. A kanaf is predominantly exogamous in that most members marry with members of other kanaf but it is possible for ‘female’ lines to form within local settlements and for ‘male’ lines of the same kanaf within these settlements to marry with these ‘female’ lines (Fox 1999).

‘Houses’ (ume, uem) are important social units but, as on Roti, there are no houses that represent an entire kanaf. Houses represent members of a kanaf at the level of the local settlement. Settlements (kuan > Tetun, knua > PAN/PMP *banua) are significant not as ordered space but as a local ordering of precedence among particular kanaf.

A recurrent theme in Atoni narratives is the need for land: Pahat maklen leuf, nifu maklen leuf: ‘Land too limited, water too limited.’ This quest for land has scattered members of the different kanaf throughout West Timor. The expansion of kanaf, as related from the perspective of any one kanaf, is described as a journey of a single being or a single name. These narratives, recounted in ritual language, describe the significant encounters of the kanaf in its passage through the Timorese landscape.

States among the Atoni are seen as a coming together of a cluster of kanaf as a single domain. The recurrent formula for this clustering is always that of a group of four lords (usif), four ‘fathers’, each representing a separate kanaf, subject to and thus supporting a single lord (usif) of a ruling kanaf. The pattern is recursive. The domain can be built up of circles of four clans. Any lesser lord can also order groups around him in a cluster of four.

The demographic strength of a kanaf and its authority as a ruling kanaf may be confined to a single domain; yet members of most kanaf are not confined to a single domain but can be found in many domains. Thus, unlike Roti, kanaf identity transcends the boundaries of any domain or state.

Any domain is an ‘ordering’ of the land. Thus, for example, the great ruler of Amanuban was known by the personal title Ta mes pah: ‘We Unify the Land’ (see Schulte Nordholt 1971: 310), or Ek pah: ‘To Enclose the Land’ (McWilliam 1989: 39).

Among the Atoni, anyone who claims local authority can be called a pah tuaf, ‘lord of the land’. The title has many of the connotations of that of dae langak on Roti. For example, a pah tuaf generally has the right to claim harvest tribute.