de Wilde was the compiler of a Javanese dictionary cited by Snouck Hurgronje as one of the principal printed sources from which Van den Berg drew his information on Javanese marriage custom. The dictionary is mentioned together with Winter’s brochure and Coolsma’s dictionary, in a passage in which Snouck Hurgronje takes Van den Berg to task for relying on book-learning — and not very recent book-learning at that — in place of personal observation. De Wilde thus belongs to the small group of nineteenth-century Dutch colonial scholars whose lexicographical work formed the staple of later, more ambitious, but less reliable syntheses.
The Citation in Context
Snouck Hurgronje’s mention of de Wilde occurs in the course of an extended criticism of Van den Berg’s treatment of the Javanese marriage ceremony. Van den Berg, Snouck Hurgronje observes, “clearly made his first acquaintance with these matters quite recently from Winter’s brochure and the dictionaries of de Wilde and Coolsma.” The criticism is twofold: first, that Van den Berg’s sources were second-hand and partly obsolete; second, that he drew from them conclusions which closer personal enquiry would have shown to be erroneous. The same criticism recurs throughout Snouck Hurgronje’s discussion of Javanese adat: Van den Berg is repeatedly taken to task for treating the Javanese evidence as though it could be understood by a foreign reader at second hand, when in fact the essential features of the system — the role of the wali, the ta’liq, the conditional divorce — were accessible only to an observer who had taken the trouble to enquire of native teachers and laymen themselves.
Place in the Lexicographical Tradition
The lexicography of Javanese was one of the foundational undertakings of Dutch colonial scholarship. Dictionaries such as de Wilde’s, together with the brochures of Winter and the works of Coolsma, formed the indispensable tool-kit of any Dutch scholar who wished to go beyond the surface of Javanese life. They were, however, no substitute for personal observation; and one of the lessons Snouck Hurgronje draws, again and again, from his critique of Van den Berg is precisely that a lexicographical tradition, however useful, can never by itself yield an adequate account of a living custom. De Wilde’s name thus survives in The Achehnese as a footnote to a footnote — a reminder of the materials on which a whole generation of Dutch colonial scholarship was built, and of the limits within which those materials could safely be used.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
de Wilde was the compiler of a Javanese dictionary cited by Snouck Hurgronje as one of the principal printed sources from which Van den Berg drew his information on Javanese marriage custom. The dictionary is mentioned together with Winter’s brochure and Coolsma’s dictionary, in a passage in which Snouck Hurgronje takes Van den Berg to task for relying on book-learning — and not very recent book-learning at that — in place of personal observation. De Wilde thus belongs to the small group of nineteenth-century Dutch colonial scholars whose lexicographical work formed the staple of later, more ambitious, but less reliable syntheses.
The Citation in Context
Snouck Hurgronje’s mention of de Wilde occurs in the course of an extended criticism of Van den Berg’s treatment of the Javanese marriage ceremony. Van den Berg, Snouck Hurgronje observes, “clearly made his first acquaintance with these matters quite recently from Winter’s brochure and the dictionaries of de Wilde and Coolsma.” The criticism is twofold: first, that Van den Berg’s sources were second-hand and partly obsolete; second, that he drew from them conclusions which closer personal enquiry would have shown to be erroneous. The same criticism recurs throughout Snouck Hurgronje’s discussion of Javanese adat: Van den Berg is repeatedly taken to task for treating the Javanese evidence as though it could be understood by a foreign reader at second hand, when in fact the essential features of the system — the role of the wali, the ta’liq, the conditional divorce — were accessible only to an observer who had taken the trouble to enquire of native teachers and laymen themselves.
Place in the Lexicographical Tradition
The lexicography of Javanese was one of the foundational undertakings of Dutch colonial scholarship. Dictionaries such as de Wilde’s, together with the brochures of Winter and the works of Coolsma, formed the indispensable tool-kit of any Dutch scholar who wished to go beyond the surface of Javanese life. They were, however, no substitute for personal observation; and one of the lessons Snouck Hurgronje draws, again and again, from his critique of Van den Berg is precisely that a lexicographical tradition, however useful, can never by itself yield an adequate account of a living custom. De Wilde’s name thus survives in The Achehnese as a footnote to a footnote — a reminder of the materials on which a whole generation of Dutch colonial scholarship was built, and of the limits within which those materials could safely be used.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.