The Leiden Legacy: Concepts of Law in Indonesia (review)

The Leiden Legacy is a particularly apt title. "Discovery" of Indonesian customary law (adat recht), eloquently defended by Cornelis Van Vollenhoven (1874–1932), and its utilization by the Netherlands East Indies government provoked acrimonious academic and administrative debates both within and between Leiden and Utrecht University schools of thought. More important in long-term perspectives, the legacy is part of the relationship existing between adat law and the nationalist project, one ultimately leading to the creation of the Republic of Indonesia and adat's ambiguous role in it. The book's subtitle, Concepts of Law in Indonesia, is less apt. "Concepts" are limited to those which became adat orthodoxy, namely, oral village customary law. Alternatives, as sources of law stemming from the vast corpus of written courtly law or its possibly more useful administrative character, are only mentioned in passing.

Organizationally the work is divided into the rise and fall of the adat recht concept. Section A: "The Making of the Myth" reviews its historical construction. More specifically, Chapter 1 introduces Cornelis Van Vollenhoven and his major writings — Misapprehensions about Adat Law and The Indonesian and His Land. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the key issue of land rights versus rights in land and the polemics it generated. Chapter 4 adds the issue of adat criminal law to the more basic controversy over its civil aspects, both of which were becoming accepted by the Netherlands East Indies government during the second quarter of the 19^th century. Chapters 5–7 ("Elaboration of the Leiden Doctrines I–III") more consistently discuss respectively adat sanctions, examples of the interwoven nature of "the conventional elements of law — the gift, land rights, use and tenure, torts, inheritance" (p. 146) and adat tribunals with their implicit procedural rules.

Section B: "Dismantling the Myth" focuses on individual studies from Holland and Indonesia. It brings out both the theoretical shortcomings and its Euro-centric nature whose agenda had more to do with nationhood than the access to or ownership of land which defined the adat. More specifically, Chapter 8 summarizes near contemporaneous criticisms of and suggestions for improvements on the Leiden doctrine of adat law. Chapter 9 emphasizes the hold adat law had on the Netherlands East Indies and scholars thereof. It also takes up the issue that adat constitutes an example of "Asian values". Chapter 10 addresses the "hidden agenda", namely, "that its latent function was to forge and anneal the icons of a national identity for the polity emerging out of Dutch colonial state" (p. 238). Chapter 11 concludes the work by suggesting (following Keebet von Benda-Beekman) that adat might be more germane to village administration than to law (p. 255).

Burns' eminently readable book raises several broader issues, two of which concern the definition of adat recht, the core of the legacy; a third, the adat paradigm. The first concerns criteria for defining adat. Burns makes it clear that the primary issue was that of land rights in what would become Indonesia. Were these sovereign and alienable as implied by the existence of the Netherlands East Indies colony and claimed by the Utrecht school? Or were they collective and inalienable as proclaimed by the adat "discovered" by Van Vollenhoven and his disciples which constituted the Leiden school? According to Burns, was it a question of "Land Rights? Or het recht van het land (approximately rights in land)". The issue continues to plague the Indonesian state. In retrospect, access to land appears to have been an unfortunate choice of definition. Documented changes in access to land, at least on Java during just the period of European presence thus automatically reflected upon the veracity of adat law, not the least its territorial applicability. See Bremen and Hoadley, in The Village Concept in the Transformation of Rural Southeast Asia, edited by Mason Hoadley and Christer Gunnarsson (London: Curzon Press, 1996). For example, that the Dutch chose to accept Raffles' questionable assertion of sovereign rights to the land in...