Suggestions for Selecting a Research Topic for your Personal Participatory Paper

Integrated Seminar 101

Key: There are four key considerations in selecting a topic for your participatory paper. 1. that you have a personal and/or academic interest in exploring, 2. that there is ample resources available locally upon which you can base your research, i.e., at the library, 3. that you select a topic other then your own religious orientation, one that is scheduled to be covered during the semester you submit the paper, e.g., during the fall semester - Hinduism, Buddhism, Primal,  or during the spring semester - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and 4. begin early in your search for a topic (this doesn’t help you now, however).

I put together a web Resource Page specifically for the purpose of helping you select a topic.  Please use it, there are wonderful and critical print as well as web resources for you to access. Its at Resources

Let me provide a couple examples of how I would go about selecting a topic.

1.  Perhaps you have a passion for outdoor activities (camping, fishing, hiking, etc.) or you are a environmental science, natural resources, agricultural science, or wildlife resources major, consider a ceremony that encompasses a pilgrimage to a distant location, traveling over a distinct landscape.

In the instance of fall semester, you might consider a Hindu pilgrimage, such as that to Benares along the Ganges, and Buddhist pilgrimages, such as that to Mount Kailish in the Himalayas.  Regardless of its religious orientation, an essential resources of any paper or group project dealing with a pilgrimage.

Other possible pilgrimage topics could include the Huichol Indian of Northern Mexico who we saw briefly in a video earlier this semester, and who take pilgrimages to gather the sacred peyote plant. A critical source is Barbara Myerhoff’s Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians.

Closer to home would be Coeur d’Alene, Crow, or Lakota Sioux vision question rituals, in which men and women sought to fast to seek a guardian spirit. Our own Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane is a great start for your research, if you focus on the vision quest. I would have you also look at Joseph Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, or from my first book, The World of the Crow, for a Crow example of the vision quest.

2.  Perhaps you have a passion for the arts (visual, musical, theatrical, performing) or you are a architecture, music, theater arts, or studio arts major, consider a ceremony that focuses on intricate ritual performance and elaborate art, music and dance.

For the fall semester, I would encourage you strongly consider doing something in the Hindu tradition, and a key resource would be Stephan Lansing’s The Balinese. There excellent discussion on the arts, and on the rituals of the Balinese in this book. You could select to do a specific rite of passage relating to a marriage or even funeral. You could select to present on the Wayang Shadow Puppet performances, or the village temple festivals. You could also consider the world renewal ceremony of Eka Dasa Rudra. Remember we have the excellent video on this subject, so if you missed it earlier, you can still check it out.

Another local option would be for you to consider the Crow, Lakota Sioux or Coeur d’Alene world renewal ceremony.  For the Jump Dance, consider Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane, for the Coeur d’Alene option, and for the Sun Dance, consider Joseph Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, for the Sioux example, or from my, The World of the Crow, for a Crow example, along with a wonder visual presentation of the entire Crow Sun Dance linked from the Resource page for this course.

3.  Another consideration would be if you are interested in literary expressions, such as sacred scriptures, like the Bhagavad Gita, or oral traditions, such as those involving the American Indian Coyote and other Animal People.

I can see a wonderful story developing around a young girl or boy and her or his interactions with and lessons from a grandparent. You could consider the importance of the oral literature or a scared text, and explain how they are told or recited, and respected, and develop an interesting story around this setting.

Now this is information discussed in Landscape Traveled by Coyote and Crane, in the instance of the Coeur d’Alene Indians, and we have an awesome web module developed by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in which can actually see and listen to tribal elders tell their oral traditions and talk about them and their meaning from their perspective. Some of the stories are hilarious (i.e., the Coyote stories). See the Coeur d'Alene Module web module. 

And if you selected a topic relating to Coeur d’Alene oral traditions, besides the Landscape book and web site (both of which you can use as reference sources for this project, even though book is one of our textbooks), a third library source could be Stories That Make the World: Oral Literature of the Indian Peoples of the Inland Northwest as Told by Lawrence Aripa, Tom Yellowtail and other Elders (the book is in the library). You could rely upon these three sources and you will have all the outside sources you’d need to complete this project.

4. Types of Ceremonies  to Consider - Rites of Passage, World Renewal, and Pilgrimage:

Some general types of ceremonies to consider include all forms of rites of passage, from birth-related rituals and naming ceremonies, to girls and boys puberty rituals, to vision quests and initiations into religious orders, to wedding and marriage ceremonies, to healing and health-related ceremonies, to funeral and death rituals.

Also collective ceremonies, such as those in which groups of people journey to sacred place, which can be either spatially or temporally oriented. Spatial journeys are illustrated in pilgrimages involving travel to a "sacred place," such as to Mecca or Jerusalem or to the Medicine Wheel in the Bighorn Mountains. Temporal journeys are illustrated in the act of storytelling and in certain communal rituals, often referred to as "world renewal ceremonies," in which time is suspended and participants return to "the perennial time of the creation."

And finally, there are sacred journeys that are of a societal focus. These journeys entail the transformation of entire societies and are often called "revitalizations movements." Such revitalizations range from Melanesian Cargo Cults and the American Indian Ghost Dance, to the founding and formation of Islam and Christianity themselves.