Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh — Family and Kampong Life in Groot-Atjeh — is an ethnographic monograph by Dr. Julius Jacobs published in 1894, treating the domestic, social and religious life of Groot-Atjeh in the last decades before the Atjeh-oorlog.
Use by Broersma
Broersma cites the book twice in Verkenningen in Atjeh. First, for the condition of lepers in Groot-Atjeh, where Jacobs had recorded that ‘de lijders in Groot-Atjeh onverbiddelijk werden verstooten’ — the sufferers in Groot-Atjeh were inexorably banished — and that they might withdraw to a particular kampong with sulphurous hot springs. The leper’s property fell to his family, and his wife was reckoned legally divorced from him. The leper-kampong thus formed ‘een kleine maatschappij van rampzaligen’ — a small society of the wretched — in which, so far as the sufferers were able, fields, crafts and fishery were kept up. Jacobs noted that leprosy was then less frequent in Groot-Atjeh than on the eastern coast, where Pidië and the Pasé-streek were worse afflicted.
Broersma’s second use of Jacobs is for the pepper-harvest of 1893, when ‘geen peper van beteekenis werd geoogst’ — no pepper of consequence was harvested — an item in the long wave of boom-and-bust that Broersma traces from Kruyt’s 1873 figure down to the disease-year of 1918.
Significance
Jacobs’s book is one of the principal pre-war sources for the social institutions of Groot-Atjeh: the gampong and mukim organisation, the household economy, and the legal condition of women, children, lepers and slaves. It is regularly cited alongside Snouck Hurgronje’s Atjèh for the ethnography of the period before the Dutch military consolidation.
See Also
- Dr. Julius Jacobs
- Groot-Atjeh
- Leproserie in Atjeh
- Pepper cultivation in Atjeh
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- 1893
- 1894
Source
Het familie- en kampongleven op Groot-Atjeh, by Dr. Julius Jacobs (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1894). Cited in Verkenningen in Atjeh by Dr. R. Broersma, pp. 25, 30.