Analysis of Tetun society requires an investigation like that directed to Atoni society. The Tetun are a large group who straddle both sides of the East/West Timor border. In West Timor, the Tetun are divided into a northern (foho: ‘mountain’) and a southern (fehan: ‘coastal’) group. The northern group reckons relations within its origin groups through males; the southern group reckons its origins through its women. The coastal Tetun also extend across the border into East Timor and another group of Tetun is located in the central south of the territory as well. There are more than 400,000 Tetun who speak the Tetun language as a first language. (Others in East Timor have adopted a simplified dialect of the language as a lingua franca, which is on its way to becoming the national language of the country.)

This paper will concentrate on the coastal Tetun of West Timor and, more specifically, on the Tetun of Wehali. Wehali is regarded as the sacred centre (laran) of the entire Tetun population. Wehali is considered rai feto, ‘female land’, as opposed to rai mane, ‘male land’, and is the traditional site of the Maromak Oan, ‘The Child of the Luminous’, who is also described as the Nai Bot, ‘The Great Lord’, or Nai Kukun, ‘The Dark Lord’. The authority of this lord was once acknowledged through the presentation of harvest offerings from groups from a large area of Timor, including many of the domains of the Atoni themselves.

Wehali’s authority still encompasses a wide area that acknowledges Wehali as its centre. According to its origin myth, Wehali is a great banyan tree that offers shade to its constituent groups. The ordering of its groups follows a fourfold division. Wehali itself is known as the Rai Lidun Hat, Rai Sikun Hat: ‘Four Corner Land, Four Section Land.’

In linguistic terms, the Tetun are the population related most closely to the Rotinese. Both peoples share similar seeming categories of social organisation. Yet the differences between these categories are profound.

The general term for ‘earth’, ‘land’ or ‘territory’ is rai. As on Roti, the land is oriented with its ‘tail’ (Tetun: ikun; Rotinese: iko-k) to the west and its ‘head’ (Tetun: ulun; Rotinese: langa-k) to the east. Another term used among the Tetun is rae. (This is the term that relates—by sound change of r > d—to the Rotinese for earth, dae.) The term rae among the Tetun is most often used in opposition to the (directional) term for sea, lor. In the coastal Tetun cosmology, north is the rae ulun (‘head land’); south is lor ain (‘foot land’). On its own, rae has the sense of (uncultivated) ‘land’, rather than ‘earth’.

Within this scheme, Wehali is the rai hun, leo hun: ‘Land of origin, leo of origin.’ The critical term here is leo. Whereas among the Rotinese, a leo is a clan-like origin group defined by its position within a particular nusak or domain and thereby confined to that nusak, a leo among the population of Wehali is a named residential group—a hamlet—comprised of specific named houses. Just as Wehali is the source and centre of the whole population, the houses in the named hamlets surrounding the central hamlet of Wehali are the origin of individual members of society. Houses and the land associated with them are inherited by the eldest of a group of sisters in each generation. Thus continuity is maintained at the centre, whose purpose has long been to export its population, particularly its male population.

Inner Wehali’s formal structure consists of four hamlets (leo) around a single central hamlet known as Laran, ‘centre’. Within this centre, however, is an inner complexity of 12 named houses (uma). (See Therik 2004 for a remarkable study of the domain of Wehali.)