Het Gajo-land en zijn bewoners — The Gajo Country and Its Inhabitants — is the principal ethnographic monograph on the Gajo country of northern Sumatra, compiled by Dr. Snouck Hurgronje from communications of educated Gajos and of efficiënte bestuursambtenaren (efficient administrative officers) and published in 1903. It is the companion-piece to Snouck Hurgronje’s great work on Atjeh itself, and Broersma in Verkenningen in Atjeh calls it, with the Atjeh work, ‘het richtsnoer is voor bestuurders en onderzoekers’ — the compass for both administrators and researchers in the interior of northern Sumatra.
Contents
The book describes the geography of the Gajo country with its central feature Laut Tawar, the social organisation of the Gajo republieken under their elected rëdjö (village-heads), the saudörö (clan) system, the Gajo house and its round family-stove, adat prohibitions on marriage within the clan, and the position of the inland population under the historical overlordship of the Atjehnese sultans. The dictionary of Dr. Hazeu is mentioned by Broersma as an indispensable supplement: ‘dat heel wat méér is dan een woordenboek’ — that is a great deal more than a dictionary.
Use in Later Literature
Broersma relies on the book for his account of the Gajo kampong at Böbasan, for the rëdjö-saudörö constitution of Gajo society, for the Gajo way of rice-cultivation on the tegal and the ladang, and for the round-stove house-plan he describes at Takengon. The book is also the source of the historical judgement that the Gajos and Alassers, once underhoorig to the Atjehnese sultans, were drawn into the hostilities against the Dutch government whenever the Atjehnese were in trouble — a dynamic which led to Van Daalen’s expeditions of 1901 and 1904 and to the eventual formation of the Afdeeling Gajo- en Alaslanden in 1905.
Significance
Het Gajo-land and its companion Atjèh are the foundational texts of Dutch colonial ethnography of northern Sumatra. Almost every later administrative and economic survey of the region, including Broersma’s Verkenningen, depends on them either directly or through the colonial officials they trained.
See Also
- Dr. Snouck Hurgronje
- Dr. Hazeu
- Gajo-land
- Alas-landen
- Laoet Tawar
- Takengon
- Böbasan
- G. C. E. van Daalen
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- 1903
- 1905
Source
Het Gajo-land en zijn bewoners (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1903), door Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, bewerkt uit mededeelingen van ontwikkelde Gajo’ers en van bestuursambtenaren. Cited in Verkenningen in Atjeh by Dr. R. Broersma, p. 80.