The Atjehnese grazing usage was the arrangement by which the owner of cattle in Atjeh pastured his animals on the fields of another, and which Van Vollenhoven recorded in his Adatrecht as “het eigenaardige recht” — the peculiar right — possibly surviving from a village beschikkingsrecht. D. W. N. de Boer denied that it was a right at all.
Van Vollenhoven’s treatment
At page 196 of Adatrecht, Van Vollenhoven declared the usage to be possibly a survival of a right of avail belonging to the village, and at page 198 accordingly listed it among the restrictions upon the Inlandsch bezitsrecht.
De Boer’s objection
De Boer replied that the usage was “in werkelijkheid geen recht… maar niet meer dan ‘n gebruik, gegrond op economische overwegingen” — in reality no right at all, but no more than a usage grounded on economic considerations: a sober exchange of economic goods, which procured for the cattle-owner a free grazing place close to his gampong, and brought the owner of the pasture the advantage of costless manuring of his ground. He added the wider proposition on which his whole study rested: the village played no part whatever in the field of rights in land in Atjeh, as he had emphasised at the head of his account.
Significance
The disagreement is one of the two explicit points on which De Boer, writing from long judicial experience in the Atjehnese courts, corrected the standard theoretical treatment of the Netherlands-Indies adatrecht; the other concerned the vitality of the beschikkingsrecht (right of avail over unappropriated land) in the zelfbesturende landschappen.
See Also
Source
Het recht op den grond in Atjeh, by D. W. N. de Boer, dated Scheveningen, November 1931, pp. 59-80. Offprint DLP-141, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, ‘s-Gravenhage; Bibliotheek KITLV accession 0060 4460 60 081470 428.