R. Edw. van Muien was a printer and publisher of Padang, on the west coast of Sumatra, at whose house a lithographed essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu nndiko in the district of Kapau was produced in 1890. He is mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje in Vol. I of The Achehnese in a footnote to the chapter on Achehnese marriage customs, as the publisher of a useful comparative document for the study of Sumatran ceremonial oratory.
Snouck Hurgronje’s notice occurs in his description of the “stereotyped discussions, as prolix as they are droll, which always accompany important domestic occurrences in the domestic life of the Achehnese.” The suitor’s envoys, on entering the house of the bride, are received with one of these formal speeches; and Snouck Hurgronje, in explanation of the comparative importance of the custom, observes that “these prolix discourses on weighty occasions are also to be met with in other parts of Sumatra and in Java. A good example of those employed in Menangkabau may be found in the essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu nndiko in the district of Kapau, lithographed at Padang in 1890 at the house of R. Edw. van Muien.”
The Menangkabau (Minangkabau) country of central Sumatra is, with Acheh and Banten, one of the three principal centres of indigenous Sumatran civilisation; and the pangulu nndiko — the chief appointed to administer the adat of a particular district — is the central figure of its ceremonial life. The speeches addressed to him at his appointment, and those exchanged between the elders of the bride’s and bridegroom’s gampong at an Achehnese wedding, belong to the same general class of “stereotyped oratory.” Snouck Hurgronje’s further observation, that “even in Java, where the adat has suffered so much from the great power of the chiefs and a foreign rule, there are floods of stereotyped oratory at every village wedding,” establishes the custom as one of the broad commonplaces of Sumatran and Javanese domestic ceremony alike.
Van Muien’s publication is of value, in Snouck Hurgronje’s eyes, not merely as a record of one particular observance but as a specimen of a class of documents that “sometimes furnish important historical and ethnographical material, for crystallized forms of this kind generally live longer than the adats on which they are founded.” A ceremonial speech, once reduced to a set form, may survive the disappearance of the institutions whose inauguration it was composed to celebrate; and the lithographed publications of Van Muien’s press, like the work of the missionary printers of Batavia and Singapore, are among the principal means by which such survivals have been preserved for the use of later scholars.
Van Muien thus belongs, with the lithographers of the Padang mission and the numerous Dutch colonial printers of the late nineteenth century, to that body of publishers whose work — undertaken often for the use of colonial officials or of native headmen — supplied the documentary raw material on which ethnographers like Snouck Hurgronje could construct their analyses. Apart from this single notice, his name does not further occur in The Achehnese.
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.
R. Edw. van Muien was a printer and publisher of Padang, on the west coast of Sumatra, at whose house a lithographed essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu nndiko in the district of Kapau was produced in 1890. He is mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje in Vol. I of The Achehnese in a footnote to the chapter on Achehnese marriage customs, as the publisher of a useful comparative document for the study of Sumatran ceremonial oratory.
Snouck Hurgronje’s notice occurs in his description of the “stereotyped discussions, as prolix as they are droll, which always accompany important domestic occurrences in the domestic life of the Achehnese.” The suitor’s envoys, on entering the house of the bride, are received with one of these formal speeches; and Snouck Hurgronje, in explanation of the comparative importance of the custom, observes that “these prolix discourses on weighty occasions are also to be met with in other parts of Sumatra and in Java. A good example of those employed in Menangkabau may be found in the essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu nndiko in the district of Kapau, lithographed at Padang in 1890 at the house of R. Edw. van Muien.”
The Menangkabau (Minangkabau) country of central Sumatra is, with Acheh and Banten, one of the three principal centres of indigenous Sumatran civilisation; and the pangulu nndiko — the chief appointed to administer the adat of a particular district — is the central figure of its ceremonial life. The speeches addressed to him at his appointment, and those exchanged between the elders of the bride’s and bridegroom’s gampong at an Achehnese wedding, belong to the same general class of “stereotyped oratory.” Snouck Hurgronje’s further observation, that “even in Java, where the adat has suffered so much from the great power of the chiefs and a foreign rule, there are floods of stereotyped oratory at every village wedding,” establishes the custom as one of the broad commonplaces of Sumatran and Javanese domestic ceremony alike.
Van Muien’s publication is of value, in Snouck Hurgronje’s eyes, not merely as a record of one particular observance but as a specimen of a class of documents that “sometimes furnish important historical and ethnographical material, for crystallized forms of this kind generally live longer than the adats on which they are founded.” A ceremonial speech, once reduced to a set form, may survive the disappearance of the institutions whose inauguration it was composed to celebrate; and the lithographed publications of Van Muien’s press, like the work of the missionary printers of Batavia and Singapore, are among the principal means by which such survivals have been preserved for the use of later scholars.
Van Muien thus belongs, with the lithographers of the Padang mission and the numerous Dutch colonial printers of the late nineteenth century, to that body of publishers whose work — undertaken often for the use of colonial officials or of native headmen — supplied the documentary raw material on which ethnographers like Snouck Hurgronje could construct their analyses. Apart from this single notice, his name does not further occur in The Achehnese.
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.