Van Langen’s Atjeh’s Westkust (1888) — full title “Atjeh’s Westkust,” published in volume II of the Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap in 1888 — is the article by K. F. H. van Langen that supplied one of the earliest systematic Western geographical accounts of the Westkust van Atjeh (West Coast of Atjeh) and that remained a standard reference for the region through the early decades of the twentieth century. The article is cited in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]] (p. 104) — alongside Snouck Hurgronje’s Snouck Hurgronje’s De Atjehers ([[1893-94)|De Atjehers]] (vol. I, p. 120) and Wilken’s Verspreide Geschriften (vol. II, p. 488) — as one of the three principal authorities for the Atjeh *adat* schimpstraf that paraded a wife-beater seated on a female buffalo.
The article
Van Langen’s article — published in 1888 in volume II of the Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (the journal of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society, founded 1873) — treated the Westkust van Atjeh as a geographical and administrative unit, and appears to have included ethnographic material on local Malay adat practices of the kind that Kreemer cites. The buffalo-riding schimpstraf recorded at p. 481 of the article is a particularly vivid example: a man convicted of wife-beating was paraded through the village seated on a female buffalo, dressed in a banana-leaf head-cloth and hung with wooden weapons and a shell necklace; the alternative form of the punishment required the delinquent to crawl on all fours for several days in public, wearing a nose-ring and eating grass “as if he were a buffalo.” The detail that the punishment centred on the buffalo — symbolically converting the malefactor into the very animal he was thought to have abused his authority over — is preserved in Van Langen’s account, and was passed on through Snouck Hurgronje and Kreemer into the comparative ethnographic literature.
Significance
Van Langen’s Atjeh’s Westkust (1888) is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history as the earliest named Western source for the Westkust van Atjeh as a describable territorial unit, and as one of the three authorities on which the standard account of the Atjeh buffalo-riding schimpstraf rests. The article is also significant as a document of the early Dutch-colonial geographical literature on Atjeh, predating the great ethnographic syntheses of Snouck Hurgronje (1893-94) and Kreemer (1922-23) by a generation.
Sources
“Atjeh’s Westkust,” by K. F. H. van Langen, in Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1888, vol. II, p. 481.
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), p. 104.