how to find an interesting research topic: the mystic kapow method

8/6/2019 How to Find an Interesting Research Topic: The Mystic Kapow Method

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Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D.University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

How to Find an Interesting Research Topic:The Case of the Museum Istiqlal

or

The Mystic KapowMethod

Social Science Research Training WorkshopYayasan Rumah Kitab, Bekasi, Jakarta, Indonesia

June 3, 2011


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Part One:

What Not To Do and What To DoBy Way of Example


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In this first part I share some photos of a power pointpresentation on research on kitab kuninggiven at a recentIslamic studies conference Is Indonesian Islam Different heldin Bogor, Indonesia.

I will then show you a few photographs of some of the moreinteresting and significant presentations in terms ofunderstanding the history of changing Islam in Indonesia.

First, we will critically analyze why this kitab kuningdata is

arguably neither interesting nor significant as regardsunderstanding the history of Indonesian Islam from ananthropological perspective with all due respect to the veryaccomplished and consummately professional presentation.

In discussing each slide in Part One we will consider the natureof the data presented, data collection and analysis in general,and the research process itself as well as the vitality of socialscience research in Indonesia today.


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Ask Yourself This:

Does the above data tell you anything about the roots ofIndonesian Islam?

Does the statistical comparative study of the percentageof types of kitab kuningin various collections tell youwhat we need to know?

Would you agree with me if I said: It looks very good butin fact it tells me little if anything of any great importanceabout the history of Indonesian Islam

Is this not classic butterfly collecting?

In the discussion we will consider why we need to takean anthropological rather than quantitative approach tothis data in order to make it meaningful and relevant.


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Dont Be Boring: This is Your Life

Even if you choose to study Kitab Kuning, you should take ananthropological approach as to their actual use.

Butterfly collecting might look very nice but intellectually

speaking it will get you nowhere. The next slides are photographs taken of three presentations at

the same conference of a very different sort.

Again, they are each deeply relevant to current and past issues

in Islam in Indonesia.

They provide examples of young Indonesian women scholarsdoing fascinating and highly competent research on religion,

gender, popular culture and social change. Remember an image speaks a thousand words and statistical

data need to be accompanied by social, legal and historicalcontext.


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Three Women Scholars Leading the Pack


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Three Women Scholars Leading the Pack There were many great presentations at the Bogor conference

showing Indonesian scholarship to be surprisingly healthyconsidering the paucity of publication. These three scholars respectively worked on religion and

social issues facing transvestites, Sunni womens comparativeempowerment and finally a scintillating analysis of Indonesian

social media (mainly twitter) through focusing on the Ariel(Peter Pan) pornography case. They provide excellent role models for the research quest:

Their work is original, it is deeply politically and culturallyrelevant and their presentations were both polished and highlyengaging.

We will also discuss the above images in terms of theimportance of rigorous data collection, including videotapingand observation - in this case in the context of an academic

conference.

For the details on the Leiden University sponsored conference,that is the program, ask Lies Marcoes later.

For my research as discussed in Part Two, see scribd and otheron-line web sites

P t T


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Part Two

The Mystic KapowResearch Path

Note:

Kapowis an ideophone. It was used in old American comics to

convey the sound and visual experience of an explosion or a

crash or the impact of a physical attack. It is not the same kapow

in Indonesian which refers to a type of Javanese soup!

As for Wham Bam Thank You Maam another American idiomaticexpression used here in relation to kapow, I leave that for you to figure

out yourself!


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This central and main part of the workshop presents

my Sufi-ist like adviceon how to cultivate a sensibility

that will allow you to recognize

the ah-hah momentwhen a truly interesting research topic

jumps out

kapowslaps you in the face

and declares:

Here I am. Choose me!


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Caution!Read constantly and widely

Gather Data Obsessively

Write up, present and publish your results with the

careful diligence you would give to prayer

Above all

Be critical and political

If you dont do all this

You have no right to be doing research

At least as far as I am concerned

Why?Because it is a sacred gift

Warning:

Do it purely for the love of the research quest!


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Sufi-ist Research

Think of the TaskOf Finding

An Interesting TopicAs a Spiritual Quest

A Moment

Along the PathwayOf a Researchers Life History

A Coming to TermsWith the Worlds We Move in

Through the Discipline of Research


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The Path as Discipline

Think of Reading, Writing and Research asinterconnected acts of faithrequiring practiced discipline

It is only through sustainedreading, writing and criticalquestioningthat meaningful, significant research can

emerge

Above all, there is, I believe, a mysticalelement in the

moment of recognitionof a particularly interesting topic,and in the path thereof and thereafter

Th Fi C d


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The Five Commandments:

R/W/R and P/P The sustained critical practiceof reading widely

for intellectual sustenance and stylistic growth,the constant commitment to writingwhether it betaking notes, crafting proposals or draftingpapers, the drive to present and publish your

research, are acts of faith akin to prayer,sacrifice and reward in a researchers life history

To achieve the blessing or sacred gift ofidentifying and completing an interestingresearch project the R/W/R-P/P circle must beunbroken, each inter-connected and sustained


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Tantric Sufi-ist Research

The essence of Tantrism is to use symbols and practice formental focus to increase ones energy and thus the effect ofpujaor prayer.

The sustained intellectual and physical effort of identifying andcompleting a truly interesting research project is in this wayTantric.

But whatever your religion, or lack thereof even, researchrequires faith and discipline.

What interests me now is the spiritual dimension of identifyinga research topic, something I had never considered before thispresentation today.

What a Strange Idea


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What a Strange Idea

The idea of developing the notion of Sufi-ist Tantric researchcame to me as I was preparing this workshop because of themystical and synthetic practise I now see inherent in theconnection between life history and research.

As for the Tantric element, that is by chance because TantricIndian Art is my latest topic of research and the subject of mymost recent presentation.

Both serve today as the foundations for what I want tocommunicate about identifying a good, that is, an interesting,significant and original research topic.


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Things Make Sense Later But Not in the Moment

Looking back on the research I have done in my life, theMuseum Istiqlal project, having been the last onecompleted, that is published, I have come to suddenly

realize that ones life history can pre-ordain almost asfate the type of research one will find oneself doing.

In the recognition of that fated-ness, of the making senseof what would otherwise seem disconnected, and inreflection upon the moments when we identifyopportunity, or it is revealed to us, there is it seems a

powerful and transformative spiritual dimension.

The sudden realization one has of a truly interesting and

significant research topic is a form of revelation.

What I Am and Am Not Saying


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What I Am and Am Not Saying

I am not saying that one should pray to God for guidance to

deliver up a good research topic though for some I supposethat is an option.

What I am simply saying that if you look back on your life as a

researcher down the road when you are older you might wellfind that that the questions you have asked, the way you havecome to them and dealt with them, says much about who youare, what you are, why you are and how it is all connected, evenfated.

It now seems to me that your nature and your life history areinextricable from what you will choose to research, how andwhere it will lead or not lead for that matter.

Ones Research Ontology Recapitulates Ones IntellectualPhylogeny

Recognizing this and cultivating it can be a deeply spiritual andmystical experience.


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Some Basics Before Some More Mysticism andThoughts on Life History and Research

To be polemical, to identify a truly interesting andrelevant research topic in social science forget

about quantitative research except of in terms ofhow you can use quantitative data to explain animportant relation.

Be anthropological

Cultivate a sense of open-ness to possibility, to theunexpected, to synchronicity, to the spiritual gift offated chance

Learn to recognize the moment of the revelation ofthe topic

Th P diti f


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The Preconditions ofCompletely Original Research

It comes to you, not you to it

It is the subject connecting to you, being offered toyou but only if you recognize it and embrace it

It requires being alert and sensitive to that momentwhen the topic reveals itself

It does not happen by looking for it


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The Power of Faith

It takes a leap of faith that you have intuitively determined atopic worth devoting your energy to its materialization as

research and its relevance.

If you cannot sustain that faith, the project will not materialize.

Even if it materializes it may have no effect in your life or evenperhaps thereafter. This does not matter.

All that matters is the process, ones professionalism incompleting the task through the act of presentation andpublication if possible, and where it leads one or otherresearchers sooner or later.


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Part Three

Three Examples of My Own Incidental Research

in Indonesian Museums

1. The Museum Istiqlal

2. The Tsunami Museum

3. The National Museum of Indonesia

How did I identify the MI as an interesting research topic


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for looking at changing Islam in Indonesia?

I did not. It came to me

In 2009 I was interviewing Professor Pirous of ITB

about his role in the planningfor the tsunami museum in Aceh

Early on the interview he said something like this:

I specifically told Kuntoro (the government)

that on no account

would I be involved in another project

that would turn out

like the Museum Istiqlal.

Wham bam thank you maam kapow topic identified!

The Museum Istiqlal? Never Heard of It!


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The Museum Istiqlal? Never Heard of It!

On The Importance of Trivia and the Researchers Life History

After the Pirous interview, I asked everyone I knew if they had heard of

the MI. Not one had except for Lies Marcoes!

I had been visiting and studying museums in Indonesia for several

years and had never heard of the MI. In addition, I had never been to

Taman Mini Indonesia because my wife has a thing against Soeharto.

Once I had a conversation with a Turkish carpet salesman in Ratu

Plaza. He told me in confidence that if Fauzi Bowo was elected

Governor they would be building an Islamic Museum in Menteng as the

country did not have one!

Everything therefore said Kapow- Here it is Lets Go!


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How Did I Come to Study the Tsunami Museum?

In 2005, Pak Sardono, then the Rector of IKJ, had asked me forsome assistance in planning their future international program.I was doing some research in the ISEAS library at NUS in

Singapore so I asked to meet Professor Anthony Reid to see ifthere was some form of collaboration with IKJ that could beexplored.

During the discussion the topic turned to mutual interests inAceh where my wife was working with Lies Marcoes. Reid toldme that the GoI had plans to build a tsunami museum and thatit was to be discussed by academics at the upcoming first

ICAIOS conerence in Banda Aceh.

I immediately said to myself What a stupid, ignorant idea.

Wham bam thank you maam kapow lets go.

What was I Doing at ISEAS?


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What was I Doing at ISEAS?

I was there reading up on the Hindu-Buddhist history of Indonesian andtrying to determine if some of the textiles depicted on the finestsculptures in the National Museum could be identified as Indianimports, specifically patola, and others as locally woven instead.

How had that topic came to me?

My wife and son and I were visiting the show on Sumatra jointlyorganized by the National Museum of Indonesia and the museum inLeiden. At the entrance there was a Nandi sculpture (of a bull) so fine itwas almost alive. One could almost feel the flesh and bone underneaththe cloth draped over it. I could not believe the detail of the cloth and thestate of preservation. I said to myself:

Good gosh, this is an exact representation of a textilefrom a known context hundreds of years ago. How fascinating.

Wham bam thank you maam. Kapow -Lets Go.

The Essence of These Three Projects


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The Essence of These Three Projects

1. The Museum Istiqlal research sought to find out whatProfessor Pirous was so bitter about. It led me to a projectmore fascinating, more rich with complexity and potentialthan I could have dreamed of.

2. The Tsunami Museum project was also historical, an attemptto document the history of the construction of a museum. Butit was more than that. It was motivated by an activist agendathat as the Provincial Museum had survived perfectly intact

any reconstruction and rehabilitation money should havegone to revitalizing that museum instead.

3. The National Museum research was also historical butfocused on a select few artifacts to document their nature and

variation and ask one specific question. Which of these wereimported patolacloths, if they were, and which were local?

The three are connected in completely incidental ways

Yet one led to the other


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What Then Connects These Three Projects?

1. I am a cultural anthropologist interested in art and religionand especially in studying museums.

2. In short, I am a museum ethnographer so even though the

focus of these three research projects was completelydifferent, they are each examples of museum anthropology.The first led to the second and on to the third.

3. Did this happen by pure chance or was it fate?

4. And why did the first project materialize in the first place?5. It was a natural process because I had studied art and

religion as recorded in stone in Latin America and then Africabefore coming to Indonesia.

6. In short, your research constitutes your life history and vicaverca, an obvious point perhaps, but think about it later in lifeand you might find a strange unfolding mystery in a larger

logic at work.

P F R i l i


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Part Four: Recapitulation

The Importance of the Five Commandments,

the Five Rules and the Power of Self-Reflexivity in Anthropology

New Dimensions in the Apparent Significance

of

Connections Between Life History and Research Trajectories

Th Fi R l f Th M i R h P h


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The Five Rules of The Mystic Research Path

Rule One: Never speak like this in a university. They will think you aremad. If you feel this nurture it and shut up.

Rule Two: Listen to your Soul it will guide you intuitively

Rule Three: Take Risks

Rule Four: Fail Forward

Rule Five: Do it Only for the Love of RWR/PP

that is:Reading/Writing/Research/Presentation/Publishing

in and of itself

H D I K Th Thi A T ?


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How Do I Know These Things Are True?

As I prepared for today I thought back on my researchexperience and realized that there is a link between mychildhood research projects and interests and the research I

did later in life.

This realization was so much so that it came to me as astronger and stronger form of revelation as I went further andfurther back in my life making the connections.

But this is not the time or place for an extended exegesis ofthat except to share with you three examples of mysticmoments along the Sufi-ist research path because theyhighlight in the last case the first ah hah moment that led to mydoctoral work and two prior experiences that pre-determined allthat followed as I moved from science to social science.

Mystic or Transcendental Moments


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The First Sufi Moment


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As a child I used to look at this photograph often

I knew it in my heart,as clear as the water itself,

that I would work in the jungle later in my life.It was more than a childish dream.

It was a vision.And it came true.

As if the image of that place,the mystic transcendental joy of the forest

Was drawing me to it.Now I can see

How it makes mysterious and numinous sense.But along the way it seemed a sequence of random acts in

which I shifted from one type of research and discipline toanother responding to an unhappiness within me

A sense of unease and lack of connectionAwaiting redemption, revelation

Who knows.

The Second Sufi Moment


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After College,

Bored with Laboratory BiochemistryBy Strange and Sudden Chance

I found myself in Heaven

doing ecological research in the Jungle

Just as I knew I would as a Child.

Later in another jungle

during an initiating ceremony into the soul vine cultI actually heard the voices of my

childhood friends in Africa talking to me.

I knew instantly in my heart that I was going home.

The journey home was fated,

uncertain and traumatic

yet exciting and permanently rewarding.My Life and My Research

The are One.

The Third Sufi Moment


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One day I was in the libraryWorking for my art history professor

Doing research on the art and religion of the SenufoTribe

Being in the S section

A slim catalog on the art of the Shona tribe caught my eye.

I opened it and saw the following photographs.

I had been right there in that very African village as a child

And there I had alsoThanks to my parents love for Africa

Seen this cultic fertility dance

Celebrating the spirits of the wild and the dead.

Kapow

Wham bam thank you ma-am

I had found my dissertation topic.


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Fate


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Fate

That Moment

Those two photographs

A professors faith

In my ability to leap

From science to social science

Took me home to Africa.

What are the chances of that?

So here is some datafrom an as of yet unfinished study


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of the Tengenenge nyaucult,

two photographstaken during fieldwork in 1987

of the very same masked spirit beings,but over twenty years later

The wicker antelope masks traveling back to the graveyardthe red flag high against the sky

a warning to the uninitiated to stay well away

or

Kapow

R/W/R/P/P

May the Circle Be Unbroken


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Moments the Heart Never Forgets


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Moments the Heart Never Forgets

I have given you herejust three moments and some images

from my life historythat are connected to my continuing research

On science, art and religion.

When I look back on it now,it all seems so clear

though the path forward is not at all.

And though this is not the time to develop this idea offated-ness and the pre-ordained nature of life and this idea

of a Sufi-ist research life quest by looking back at eachtransformative moment and experience,at my research ontogeny and phylogeny,the idea would never have occurred to me

if not for this workshop today.

Seize the Opportunity


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Every research opportunity that has come to mehas come about superficially by pure chance

but in fact - not at all.Each time I intuitively recognized

that a doorwas opening into another world.

Looking back on it nowI can see links

Between research interests I had as a childand

research projects that came to me as an adult.

So I invite you to cultivate a mystical senseof recognizing research that you were born to do

for some strangeand

wonderful reason

Synchronicity


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Life and research can be a gift

In which people share ideas and data with othersWhose paths have crossed by chance or fate,

physically, institutionally

or through the generative power

of published research.

Here

Nothing happens without a reason.It is the oldest principle of spiritual life.

But what we too often perhaps do not realize

Is just how this spiritual synchronicity animates the

Conjunction of our unfolding life history

and the research

we do along the way.

That is then the gift you have all given me today

Part Four


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That is then the gift you have all given me today

In return, for the final and practical part of this workshop,

please break into groups of two or more.

Towards identifying potential research topics that are

interesting and meaningful to your spiritual life path

ask yourself these two questions:

1. Have you ever had an ah hah Sufi-ist research moment?

2. Have you ever recognized a door of research opportunity,

opened it with complete faith, and thus transformed your lifespath?


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1. Share that kapowmoment with your partner.

2. Develop it very briefly into a proposal. State what theresearch topic is, why it is original and interesting and how

you could investigate it.

3. Then, for the last part of the workshop today, some of you will

briefly share your research proposal with us and we willcollectively discuss if yours is or is not a significant kapowresearch proposal.

To Recapitulate


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p

ReadRead as if you Thank God

To have the sight and fortune to do so.Write

Religiously take notes, draft proposals, write papersResearch

Do Research Only Because You Love itForget About The Money!

PresentAnd there

Connect heart and soul to your audienceFinally, Publish

Or VerilyAs we believe in Western Academia

You May as WellPerish

And Remember: In a Sense Your Teachers are Spiritual Guides

In the transformative research quest


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In the transformative research quest,

Whether they realize it or not, or you yourself,The teachers

Or gatekeepers who take you in or open doors for youAnd assist you along the path of self-realization

Are in fact spiritual guides,Angels of a sort.

Nothing happens without faith and good fortuneThe human element

And its institutional matrix.

Recognize all this as gifts to youFrom other souls

And universal chanceThat will transform you

You will benefit from itAnd appreciate it for the rest of your life

Whether you realize it or not.

Only Connect


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Only Connect

Thank You

how to find an interesting research topic: the mystic kapow method

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