How to Find an Interesting Research Topic:

The Case of the Museum Istiqlal

or

The Mystic Kapow Method

Social Science Research Training Workshop

Yayasan Rumah Kitab, Bekasi, Jakarta, Indonesia
June 3, 2011

Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 Part One:

What Not To Do and What To Do

By Way of Example
• In this first part I share some photos of a power point
presentation on research on kitab kuning given at a recent
Islamic studies conference “Is Indonesian Islam Different” held
in Bogor, Indonesia.

• I will then show you a few photographs of some of the more

interesting and significant presentations in terms of
understanding the history of changing Islam in Indonesia.

• First, we will critically analyze why this kitab kuning data is

arguably neither interesting nor significant as regards
understanding the history of Indonesian Islam from an
anthropological perspective with all due respect to the very
accomplished and consummately professional presentation.

• In discussing each slide in Part One we will consider the nature

of the data presented, data collection and analysis in general,
and the research process itself as well as the vitality of social
science research in Indonesia today.
 Ask Yourself This:

• Does the above data tell you anything about the roots of
Indonesian Islam?
• Does the statistical comparative study of the percentage
of types of kitab kuning in various collections tell you
what we need to know?
• Would you agree with me if I said: “It looks very good but
in fact it tells me little if anything of any great importance
about the history of Indonesian Islam”
• Is this not classic butterfly collecting?
• In the discussion we will consider why we need to take
an anthropological rather than quantitative approach to
this data in order to make it meaningful and relevant.
 Don’t Be Boring: This is Your Life
• Even if you choose to study Kitab Kuning, you should take an
anthropological 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 scholars
doing 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 historical
context.
 Three Women Scholars Leading the Pack
• There were many great presentations at the Bogor conference
showing Indonesian scholarship to be surprisingly healthy
considering the paucity of publication.
• These three scholars respectively worked on religion and
social issues facing transvestites, Sunni women’s comparative
empowerment 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 culturally
relevant and their presentations were both polished and highly
engaging.
• We will also discuss the above images in terms of the
importance of rigorous data collection, including videotaping
and 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 other
on-line web sites
 Part Two

The Mystic Kapow Research Path

Note:

Kapow is 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 Ma’am” another American idiomatic

expression used here in relation to kapow, I leave that for you to figure
out yourself!
This central and main part of the workshop presents
my Sufi-ist like advice
on how to cultivate a sensibility
that will allow you to recognize
the ah-hah moment
when a truly interesting research topic
jumps out
kapow
slaps you in the face
and declares:
“Here I am. Choose me!”
 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 don’t 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!
 Sufi-ist Research

Think of the Task

Of Finding
An Interesting Topic
As a Spiritual Quest
A Moment
Along the Pathway
Of a Researcher’s Life History
A Coming to Terms
With the Worlds We Move in
Through the Discipline of Research
 The Path as Discipline

• Think of Reading, Writing and Research as

interconnected acts of faith requiring practiced discipline

• It is only through sustained reading, writing and critical

questioning that meaningful, significant research can
emerge

• Above all, there is, I believe, a mystical element in the

moment of recognition of a particularly interesting topic,
and in the path thereof and thereafter
 The Five Commandments:
R/W/R and P/P
• The sustained critical practice of reading widely
for intellectual sustenance and stylistic growth,
the constant commitment to writing whether it be
taking notes, crafting proposals or drafting
papers, the drive to present and publish your
research, are acts of faith akin to prayer,
sacrifice and reward in a researcher’s life history
• To achieve the blessing or sacred gift of
identifying and completing an interesting
research project the R/W/R-P/P circle must be
unbroken, each inter-connected and sustained
 Tantric Sufi-ist Research
• The essence of Tantrism is to use symbols and practice for
mental focus to increase one’s energy and thus the effect of
puja or prayer.

• The sustained intellectual and physical effort of identifying and

completing a truly interesting research project is in this way
Tantric.

• But whatever your religion, or lack thereof even, research

requires faith and discipline.

• What interests me now is the spiritual dimension of identifying

a research topic, something I had never considered before this
presentation today.
 What a Strange Idea

• The idea of developing the notion of Sufi-ist Tantric research

came to me as I was preparing this workshop because of the
mystical and synthetic practise I now see inherent in the
connection between life history and research.

• As for the Tantric element, that is by chance because Tantric

Indian Art is my latest topic of research and the subject of my
most recent presentation.

• Both serve today as the foundations for what I want to

communicate about identifying a good, that is, an interesting,
significant and original research topic.
 Things Make Sense Later But Not in the Moment

• Looking back on the research I have done in my life, the

Museum Istiqlal project, having been the last one
completed, that is published, I have come to suddenly
realize that one’s life history can pre-ordain almost as
fate the type of research one will find oneself doing.

• In the recognition of that fated-ness, of the making sense

of what would otherwise seem disconnected, and in
reflection upon the moments when we identify
opportunity, 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
• I am not saying that one should pray to God for guidance to
deliver up a good research topic though for some I suppose
that 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 well
find that that the questions you have asked, the way you have
come to them and dealt with them, says much about who you
are, what you are, why you are and how it is all connected, even
fated.

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

• One’s Research Ontology Recapitulates One’s Intellectual

Phylogeny

• Recognizing this and cultivating it can be a deeply spiritual and

mystical experience.
 Some Basics Before Some More Mysticism and
Thoughts on Life History and Research

• To be polemical, to identify a truly interesting and

relevant research topic in social science forget
about quantitative research except of in terms of
how you can use quantitative data to explain an
important relation.

• Be anthropological

• Cultivate a sense of open-ness to possibility, to the

unexpected, to synchronicity, to the spiritual gift of
fated chance

• Learn to recognize the moment of the revelation of

the topic
 The Preconditions of
Completely Original Research

• It comes to you, not you to it

• It is the subject connecting to you, being offered to

you but only if you recognize it and embrace it

• It requires being alert and sensitive to that moment

when the topic reveals itself

• It does not happen by looking for it

 The Power of Faith

• It takes a leap of faith that you have intuitively determined a

topic 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 even

perhaps thereafter. This does not matter.

• All that matters is the process, one’s professionalism in

completing the task through the act of presentation and
publication if possible, and where it leads one or other
researchers sooner or later.
 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
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 planning
for 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 ma’am – kapow – topic identified!

 The Museum Istiqlal? Never Heard of It!

On The Importance of Trivia and the Researcher’s 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 – Let’s Go!”

 How Did I Come to Study the Tsunami Museum?
• In 2005, Pak Sardono, then the Rector of IKJ, had asked me for
some 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 if
there was some form of collaboration with IKJ that could be
explored.

• During the discussion the topic turned to mutual interests in

Aceh where my wife was working with Lies Marcoes. Reid told
me that the GoI had plans to build a tsunami museum and that
it 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 ma’am – kapow – let’s go.

 What was I Doing at ISEAS?

I was there reading up on the Hindu-Buddhist history of Indonesian and

trying to determine if some of the textiles depicted on the finest
sculptures in the National Museum could be identified as Indian
imports, 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 jointly
organized by the National Museum of Indonesia and the museum in
Leiden. At the entrance there was a Nandi sculpture (of a bull) so fine it
was almost alive. One could almost feel the flesh and bone underneath
the cloth draped over it. I could not believe the detail of the cloth and the
state of preservation. I said to myself:

“Good gosh, this is an exact representation of a textile

from a known context hundreds of years ago. How fascinating.”

Wham bam thank you ma’am. Kapow - Let’s Go.

 The Essence of These Three Projects
1. The Museum Istiqlal research sought to find out what
Professor Pirous was so bitter about. It led me to a project
more fascinating, more rich with complexity and potential
than I could have dreamed of.

2. The Tsunami Museum project was also historical, an attempt

to document the history of the construction of a museum. But
it was more than that. It was motivated by an activist agenda
that as the Provincial Museum had survived perfectly intact
any reconstruction and rehabilitation money should have
gone to revitalizing that museum instead.

3. The National Museum research was also historical but

focused on a select few artifacts to document their nature and
variation and ask one specific question. Which of these were
imported patola cloths, if they were, and which were local?

The three are connected in completely incidental ways

Yet one led to the other
 What Then Connects These Three Projects?
1. I am a cultural anthropologist interested in art and religion
and especially in studying museums.
2. In short, I am a museum ethnographer so even though the
focus of these three research projects was completely
different, 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 Africa
before coming to Indonesia.
6. In short, your research constitutes your life history and vica
verca, an obvious point perhaps, but think about it later in life
and you might find a strange unfolding mystery in a larger
logic at work.
 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
 The Five Rules of The Mystic Research Path

Rule One: Never speak like this in a university. They will think you are
mad. 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
 How Do I Know These Things Are True?

• As I prepared for today I thought back on my research

experience and realized that there is a link between my
childhood “research” projects and interests and the research I
did later in life.

• This realization was so much so that it came to me as a

stronger and stronger form of revelation as I went further and
further back in my life making the connections.

• But this is not the time or place for an extended exegesis of

that except to share with you three examples of mystic
moments along the Sufi-ist research path because they
highlight in the last case the first ah hah moment that led to my
doctoral work and two prior experiences that pre-determined all
that followed as I moved from science to social science.
Mystic or Transcendental Moments
 The First Sufi Moment
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 to
another responding to an unhappiness within me
A sense of unease and lack of connection
Awaiting redemption, revelation
Who knows.
 The Second Sufi Moment
After College,
Bored with Laboratory Biochemistry
By 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 cult
I 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
They are One.
 The Third Sufi Moment

One day I was in the library

Working 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 also
Thanks 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.
 Fate

That Moment
Those two photographs
A professor’s 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 data
from an as of yet unfinished study
of the Tengenenge nyau cult,
two photographs
taken during fieldwork in 1987
of the very same masked spirit beings,
but over twenty years later

The wicker antelope masks traveling back to the graveyard

the 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

 Moments the Heart Never Forgets
I have given you here
just three moments and some images
from my life history
that 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 of

fated-ness and the pre-ordained nature of life and this idea
of a Sufi-ist research life quest by looking back at each
transformative 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
Every research opportunity that has come to me
has come about superficially by pure chance
but in fact - not at all.
Each time I intuitively recognized
that a door
was opening into another world.

Looking back on it now

I can see links
Between research interests I had as a child
and
research projects that came to me as an adult.

So I invite you to cultivate a mystical sense

of recognizing research that you were born to do
for some strange
and
wonderful reason
 Synchronicity
Life and research can be a gift
In which people share ideas and data with others
Whose 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.
 Part Four
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 life’s
path?
1. Share that kapow moment with your partner.

2. Develop it very briefly into a proposal. State what the

research 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 will
collectively discuss if yours is or is not a significant kapow
research proposal.
 To Recapitulate
Read
Read as if you Thank God
To have the sight and fortune to do so.
Write
Religiously take notes, draft proposals, write papers
Research
Do Research Only Because You Love it
Forget About The Money!
Present
And there
Connect heart and soul to your audience
Finally, Publish
Or Verily
As we believe in Western Academia
You May as Well
Perish
And Remember: In a Sense Your Teachers are Spiritual Guides

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 you
And assist you along the path of self-realization
Are in fact spiritual guides,
Angels of a sort.

Nothing happens without faith and good fortune

The human element
And its institutional matrix.

Recognize all this as gifts to you

From other souls
And universal chance
That will transform you

You will benefit from it

And appreciate it for the rest of your life –
Whether you realize it or not.
Only Connect

Thank You