D. W. N. de Boer was a Netherlands-Indies colonial official and jurist who served as Voorzitter (chairman) of Atjehnese moesapat and landschapsgerechten — the native and territorial courts of Atjeh — and who, after his return to the Netherlands, published at Scheveningen in November 1931 the monographic study Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (“The right to the soil in Atjeh”), printed in pages 59-80 of a colonial periodical and preserved as offprint DLP-141 in the library of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde.
Judicial service in Atjeh
De Boer’s knowledge of Atjehnese land law was gathered in the course of judicial service. He described his study as a resume of data collected “te hooi en te gras” — haphazardly, as occasion offered — over many years while sitting as chairman of Atjehnese moesapats and landschapsgerechten. Throughout the study he introduced institutions from the standpoint of the bench: the atra peunoelang, for instance, he presented as “een bezitsvorm, dien de Voorzitter van Moesapat of Landschapsgerecht mede nog al eens ontmoet” — a form of possession that the chairman of a moesapat or landschapsgerecht not infrequently encounters.
His observations covered the whole of the gewest: Groot-Atjeh as the directly governed territory, the onderafdeeling (subdivision) Sigli in the afdeeling (district) Pidië, the landschappen (territories) Aréë, Ndjong, Keumangan and Pidië-proper within it, the landschap (territory) Sawang in the onderafdeeling Lho’ Seumaweh of the afdeeling Noordkust van Atjeh, the VI moekims Peukan Bada in Groot-Atjeh, and Idi on the east coast.
Scholarly position
De Boer wrote within the framework of Netherlands-Indies adatrecht scholarship, citing Snouck Hurgronje’s De Atjehers and Van Vollenhoven’s Adatrecht repeatedly and by page. He nevertheless departed from Van Vollenhoven on two points. Against Van Vollenhoven’s statement (Adatrecht, p. 196) that “een verbleekt of slapend beschikkingsrecht bestaat hier niet” — a faded or sleeping right of avail does not exist here — De Boer held that this was “niet juist” for the zelfbesturende landschappen. And against Van Vollenhoven’s treatment of the Atjehnese grazing usage as “het eigenaardige recht,” possibly a survival of a village beschikkingsrecht, De Boer argued that it was no right at all but a purely economic usage, “‘n nuchtere uitwisseling van economische goederen” — a sober exchange of economic goods.
His governing thesis was that the gampong played no role whatever in Atjehnese rights in land, a proposition he stated at the head of the study and reasserted in its central sections.
Purpose of publication
De Boer explained his motive for publication in the closing paragraph of the study: he had wished to print the material only “in de hoop dat ook deze bescheiden bijdrage voor de studie van het Adatrecht van nut zal kunnen zijn, al zou ze alleen maar aanleiding geven tot critiek, correctie, commentaar” — in the hope that even this modest contribution to the study of adatrecht might prove useful, if only by giving occasion for criticism, correction and commentary. He justified his recording of obsolete institutions such as the haq thilangkob on the ground that the noting-down of “adatrechterlijke antiquiteiten” could be of use for comparative or explanatory study of the adatrecht of other regions.
Significance
De Boer’s study is one of the principal practitioner accounts of Atjehnese land law, and the source of much of the recorded technical vocabulary of Atjehnese rights in soil, clearance, share-cropping, pledge and mortgage. Because he wrote from the bench, his account preserves the procedural and evidentiary dimension of the law — what a plaintiff had to prove, what remedies a losing party retained — which purely descriptive ethnographies of Atjeh generally omit.
See Also
- Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (De Boer)
- Beschikkingsrecht in Atjeh
- Moesapat
- Landschapsgerecht
- C. van Vollenhoven
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Scheveningen
- 1931
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.