W. K. H. Ypes was a Dutch ethnographer whose Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra (“Contribution to the knowledge of kinship on Sumatra”) documented, among other Sumatran genealogical traditions, the marga Ramin origin legend of Boven-Singkel involving an Atjeher from Pasei named Gedong and his encounter with an eel and a buffalo. Ypes’s work is cited twice in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]]: once (at p. 215, nt.) for the Batakse legend of a buffalo-fight at Tamba between Bataks and the Malays of Baroes, and once (at p. 220, nt. 1) for the Boven-Singkel marga Ramin legend of Gedong the Atjeher of Pasei.
The Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra
Ypes’s Bijdrage appears to have been a substantial contribution to the early-twentieth-century Dutch ethnographic literature on Sumatran kinship systems, treating the genealogical organisation of the various Sumatran peoples — Batak marga, Atjehnese kawōm, Gayo and Alas mergō, Malay soekoe, and similar patrilineal or matrilineal kinship groups — and including, as part of that documentation, the origin-legends attached to particular lineages. The two passages cited in De Karbouw show Ypes’s coverage extending from the Batak country (the legend of a buffalo-fight at Tamba between Bataks and the Malays of Baroes) through the Singkil area (the marga Ramin legend of Gedong of Pasei) — that is, along the western and northern flanks of the Sumatran highland belt that includes Atjeh proper and the Gajoland-Alas interior.
The marga Ramin legend preserved in Ypes (and reproduced in De Karbouw, p. 220, nt. 1) tells how Gedong, an Atjeher of Pasei and the eponymous ancestor of the marga Ramin of Boven-Singkel, suffered shipwreck on his way to Belawan, was caught by an eel that brought him to land after he swore never to eat eel, and was then confronted on the beach by a buffalo that threatened to push him back into the sea but released him unharmed after he swore never to eat buffalo-meat. The members of the marga Ramin are said to abstain, to this day, from both eel and buffalo-meat. The legend is one of the Sumatran pantang-origin narratives that Kreemer assembles in De Karbouw’s chapter on the prohibition of albino-buffalo slaughter, alongside the Atjeh pantang legend of the white buffalo licking the corpse-fluid of a fallen child.
Significance
Ypes’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is as the source of record for the marga Ramin legend of Boven-Singkel — a narrative that ties a Singkil-area genealogical tradition to the Pasai cultural sphere of northern Atjeh and that supplies a documented instance of the wider Sumatran pattern in which buffalo-meat avoidance is legitimated by an ancestral encounter. His Bijdrage is one of the early-twentieth-century Dutch ethnographic authorities on which the comparative study of Sumatran kinship and its associated food-prohibitions rests.
Sources
Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra, by W. K. H. Ypes, p. 57 nt. 1.
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), pp. 215, 220.
See Also
- Boven-Singkel
- Gedong (Atjeher of Pasei)
- J. Kreemer
- Kreemer’s De Karbouw (1956)
- Pantang of the albino buffalo in Atjeh
- Pasei
- [[marga Ramin]
W. K. H. Ypes was a Dutch ethnographer whose Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra (“Contribution to the knowledge of kinship on Sumatra”) documented, among other Sumatran genealogical traditions, the marga Ramin origin legend of Boven-Singkel involving an Atjeher from Pasei named Gedong and his encounter with an eel and a buffalo. Ypes’s work is cited twice in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]]: once (at p. 215, nt.) for the Batakse legend of a buffalo-fight at Tamba between Bataks and the Malays of Baroes, and once (at p. 220, nt. 1) for the Boven-Singkel marga Ramin legend of Gedong the Atjeher of Pasei.
The Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra
Ypes’s Bijdrage appears to have been a substantial contribution to the early-twentieth-century Dutch ethnographic literature on Sumatran kinship systems, treating the genealogical organisation of the various Sumatran peoples — Batak marga, Atjehnese kawōm, Gayo and Alas mergō, Malay soekoe, and similar patrilineal or matrilineal kinship groups — and including, as part of that documentation, the origin-legends attached to particular lineages. The two passages cited in De Karbouw show Ypes’s coverage extending from the Batak country (the legend of a buffalo-fight at Tamba between Bataks and the Malays of Baroes) through the Singkil area (the marga Ramin legend of Gedong of Pasei) — that is, along the western and northern flanks of the Sumatran highland belt that includes Atjeh proper and the Gajoland-Alas interior.
The marga Ramin legend preserved in Ypes (and reproduced in De Karbouw, p. 220, nt. 1) tells how Gedong, an Atjeher of Pasei and the eponymous ancestor of the marga Ramin of Boven-Singkel, suffered shipwreck on his way to Belawan, was caught by an eel that brought him to land after he swore never to eat eel, and was then confronted on the beach by a buffalo that threatened to push him back into the sea but released him unharmed after he swore never to eat buffalo-meat. The members of the marga Ramin are said to abstain, to this day, from both eel and buffalo-meat. The legend is one of the Sumatran pantang-origin narratives that Kreemer assembles in De Karbouw’s chapter on the prohibition of albino-buffalo slaughter, alongside the Atjeh pantang legend of the white buffalo licking the corpse-fluid of a fallen child.
Significance
Ypes’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is as the source of record for the marga Ramin legend of Boven-Singkel — a narrative that ties a Singkil-area genealogical tradition to the Pasai cultural sphere of northern Atjeh and that supplies a documented instance of the wider Sumatran pattern in which buffalo-meat avoidance is legitimated by an ancestral encounter. His Bijdrage is one of the early-twentieth-century Dutch ethnographic authorities on which the comparative study of Sumatran kinship and its associated food-prohibitions rests.
Sources
Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra, by W. K. H. Ypes, p. 57 nt. 1.
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), pp. 215, 220.