Boven-Singkel (Upper Singkel; in present-day Aceh Singkil Regency) is the upstream region of the Singkel river in southern Atjeh, mentioned in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]] (p. 220) as the home of the marga Ramin, whose eponymous ancestor Gedong — an Atjeher of Pasei — gave rise, by his shipwreck on the way to Belawan and his encounters with an eel and a buffalo, to the marga’s double food-prohibition against eel and buffalo-meat. The legend is recorded by Ypes in his Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra (p. 57 nt. 1) and is reproduced in De Karbouw as one of the Sumatran pantang-origin legends explaining the prohibition of buffalo-meat for particular genealogical groups.
In De Karbouw
The Boven-Singkel passage in De Karbouw (p. 220) — the only passage in the book that names the region — reads in full:
“Van de marga Ramin in Boven-Singkel bestaat de volgende legende. Een Atjeher van Pasei, Gedong geheten, die de stamvader heet te zijn van genoemde marga, leed op weg naar Belawan schipbreuk en werd door een paling gevangen, welke hem echter naar land bracht, toen hij de eed had gezworen, nooit paling te zullen eten. Op het strand wachtte hem evenwel een buffel op (of dit een albino-dier was, wordt niet vermeld), welke hem dreigde, weder in zee te zullen stoten, doch hem ongedeerd liet landen, toen hij gezworen had, ook geen buffelvlees te zullen nuttigen. Men zegt, dat de leden van de marga Ramin nu nog geen paling of karbouwenvlees mogen eten.” The passage fixes Boven-Singkel as the home of the marga Ramin, a patrilineal kinship group (marga) whose eponymous ancestor was an Atjeher from Pasei — a provenance that ties the Singkil-area genealogical tradition to the North-Acehnese Pasai cultural sphere. The double prohibition (eel and buffalo-meat) contracted by Gedong during his maritime crisis is presented by De Karbouw as one of the Sumatran pantang-origin narratives alongside the Atjeh pantang legend of the white buffalo licking the corpse-fluid of a fallen child (the legend explaining the prohibition for *kawōm* Dja Sandang of Groot-Atjeh, the Gajoland groups of Kedjoeroen Boekit and Petiambang, the Alas mergō’s, and the Malays of Atjeh’s Westkust).
Historical-geographical context
Boven-Singkel — the upstream country of the Singkel river — lies in the southern part of what is now Aceh Singkil Regency, in the border zone between the Atjeh cultural sphere proper and the Batak country to the south-east. The population of the Singkel area includes Singkil speakers (an Austronesian language closely related to the languages of the adjacent south-Atjeh and north-Tapanuli coasts), and the area has long been a zone of cultural contact between Atjehnese, Batak and Malay influences. The marga Ramin documented by Ypes is one of the patrilineal marga of this border zone; the legend of Gedong of Pasei gives it an explicitly Atjehnese-Pasai ancestral provenance.
Significance
Boven-Singkel’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is as the home of the marga Ramin, whose ancestral legend ties the Singkil-area genealogical tradition to the Pasai cultural sphere of northern Atjeh, and whose double food-prohibition (against eel and buffalo-meat) is one of the documented Sumatran instances of the wider Atjeh-north-Sumatran pattern in which buffalo-meat avoidance is legitimated by an ancestral encounter. The legend is also significant as a document of the cultural contact between the Atjeh and Batak spheres in the southern Atjeh border zone.
Sources
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. 220.
Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra, by W. K. H. Ypes, p. 57 nt. 1.