The Social Organisation and Customary Law of the Toba-Batak of Northern Sumatra
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KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT VOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE TRANSLA nON SERIES 7
THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION AND CUSTOMARY LAW OF THE TOBA-BATAK OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
BY
J. C. VERGOUWEN
WITH A PREFACE BY]. KEUNING
PUBLICATION COMMISSIONED AND FINANCED BY THE NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL RELATIONS
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.Y: 1964
TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY JEUNE SCOTT·KEMBALL
Add itional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com
ISBN 978-94-015-0415-7 ISBN 978-94-015-1035-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-1035-6 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1964
PREFACE
.J.
c.
Vergouwen 's work , H et R echtsleven der T'oba-Bataks, here presented in an English translation, was published in the autumn of 1933, a few weeks before the author's death at the early age of 44 from tuberculosis, from which he had suffere d since 1930. During the time he spent in a sanatorium in Davos and later in the Netherlands, he began and completed his monograph on th e customary law of the Toba-Batak. His book immediately became one of the outstanding works of Dutch scholarship on Indonesian customary law (Adat law). Jacob Cornelis Vergouwen began his career as an administrative officer in South Borneo (now K alimantan ) in 1913, after a brief practical training. In 1921 he was given the opportunity for further study at the University of L eiden where a five-year scientific training for a career as an administrative officer in the Dutch East Indies had just been instituted. On obtaining his Master's degr ee, he was appointed to the Tapanuli Residency, from of old , the homeland of the Toba, M andailing, Angkola, and Dairi or Pakpak Batak. As a young offic ial, Vergouwen had already evinced great interest in th e laws and customs of th e Dayak people in Borneo. His studies at the University brought him into close contact with the founder of the science of Indonesian Adat law, Professor Cornelis van Vollenhoven, one of th e greatest Dutch jurists of this century. Since 1901, Van Vollenhoven had been teaching, among other things, Indonesian Adat Law at th e University of Leiden. For his research he divided the Dutch East Indies into 19 law areas ('r echtskringen' ) based on the existing diversity in the laws and customs of the peoples in the various parts of Indonesia. By 1918 he had completed the first scholarly description of the unwritten customary law in these 19 'homeonomic' groups. He found his material for it by laboriously searching through the anthropological literature of the time, in accounts of travels, in official reports, in the communications of Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries and in adat law judgements, at that time only published sporadically. It was a masterly work ; scholarly pioneering in the true sense. Van Vollenhoven work ed out a fixed and specific taxonomy and introduced special terms for the qualification of the legal facts and the
VI
CUSTOMARY LAW OF THE TOBA-BATAK
legal concepts appropriate to the nature and content of the unwritte
