The work on this report on Javanese religion has been conducted in several phases.
In the first phase, from September 1951 to July 1952, intensive preparation in the Indonesian language (i.e., Malay) was undertaken at Harvard, first under Professor Isadore Dyen and then under Mr. Rufus Hendon, later director of the project, with the assistance of native speakers. July to October of 1952 was spent in the Netherlands interviewing Dutch scholars on Indonesia and making use of the unparalleled library resources on Indonesia at the University of Leiden and at the Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
The second phase, from October 1952 to May 1953, was spent mainly in Djokdjakarta, a central Javanese court town, where a study of Javanese language, using students from Gadjah Mada University, was undertaken, and a certain amount of general familiarity with Javanese culture and urban life gained. A month and a half was also spent, during this period, in Djakarta, the capital of the country, interviewing religious and political leaders, collecting statistics, and investigating the organization of the government bureaucracy in general and the Ministry of Religion in particular.
The third phase, from May 1953 to September 1954, comprised the field work period proper, and was spent in Modjokuto. My wife and I lived during this whole period with the family of a railroad worker at the northern edge of the town, the house actually being located not in the village of Modjokuto itself, but in a neighboring one which was only urban in its southeastern quarter.
This family consisted of the worker, a man of about sixty-five, his wife, perhaps five years younger, an adult married, but now divorced daughter, probably in her late thirties, a> son of about twelve years of age, and a daughter and son of the adult daughter—i.e., grandchildren of the householders—about ten and four years of age. Two other older married sons lived in Djakarta and returned once or twice for stays during this time. We had one-half of the house more or less to ourselves, and built a wooden “office” in the main room for additional privacy.
All work with informants, formal or informal, was conducted in Javanese, with the exception of a few young, highly nationalistic students who preferred Indonesian (Malay). No interpreters were ever used, and although during the early months of research, communication was both awkward and not wholly reliable, this total sink-or-swim commitment to Javanese fairly soon led to at least a relatively high degree of fluency and comprehension, and the knowledge of the language thus attained proved to be by far the most important single research tool in the investigation of religious beliefs and practices.
Despite the focus of this report on religion, and despite the formal division of labor among the six field workers taking part in the project, all aspects of Modjokuto culture and society were given some attention in the actual process of research, and work on religion as such occupied a good deal less than one-half of my total time.
Various procedures of research were employed. I did a good deal of extended and systematic work with particular informants on particular topics, either in their own homes or in our wooden “office.” These informants represented every major religious stream in the local society, the major occupational types, the main political affiliations. They were also scattered as to place of residence, class standing, regional background, and age, as well as being of both sexes (the bulk of formal interviewing of women was done, however, by my wife). It cannot be claimed that as a group my informants were a representative sample in the specific sense, for the practical problems of securing informants in the field and the lack of a wholly reliable and detailed quantitative description of the population as a whole, made this impossible. But the group was at least neither heavily loaded in any one direction nor lacking in representatives of any major social and cultural category. With one or two exceptions, I did not explicitly pay informants, but rather periodically gave them gifts as expressions of gratitude.
The bulk of the period of research was actually not spent in the formal interviewing of specialized informants however, but in more informal “participant observation” activities. I attended dozens of public events, organizational meetings, rituals, and so on. Hours were spent in “idle” conversation or informal interviewing in coffee shops, in stores and market stalls, in the fields, in the office of the village, in the mosque yard, etc. Trips with informants—to their parents’ home, to the city, to see some ruin or other, etc.—were taken. I sat in school rooms, watched soccer games—even in the movies one does not escape one’s work, because one finds oneself more interested in the pattern of audience reaction than in the movie, particularly as the movie is usually “Tarzan’s Savage Revenge.”
Finally, a good deal of statistical and other data were gathered from the various government offices in the town; Thematic Apperception Tests were given (by my wife) to thirty-five subjects; sentence completion tests were administered to high school students, who also wrote short “life history” compositions for us (in Indonesian). Together with other members of the project, most notably Donald Fagg who planned and directed the work, a map of the urban area was prepared showing house types, business, public buildings and areas, etc., which was then correlated, as well as possible, with voting lists, to give at least a rough household and occupational census of the town.
I represented my role, as did the other members of the project, in a simply straight-forward way for what it was: I described myself as a university student come to Java to gather material on “the Javanese way of life” in order to write a dissertation for a university degree. Not all my informants, of course, understood very precisely what I meant—though a rather surprising number did—but the fact that I was murid, a student, was a fully comprehensible and readily accepted role, for reasons which should be apparent from the text.
Though attitudes toward me and assessments of my “real” motivations naturally varied, the overwhelming majority of the people with whom I came in contact seemed willing to accept me as more or less what I said I was, and to assist me in my work. During the whole period I never met with an outright rejection, a simple refusal to have anything to do with me at all, a reflection of Javanese etiquette rather more than my own social skills, and a great many people responded with genuine enthusiasm—or at least as much enthusiasm as the Javanese feel it proper to permit themselves to feel—to my requests for aid. Despite the fact that there were, altogether, eleven of us Americans in and around Modjokuto, no incident, political or personal, occurred and no member of the project experienced any unusual difficulties in carrying out his research plans.
The single space quotations in the text are from my field notes, with at most a few grammatical and syntactical repairs, the removal of some unprofessional editorial comments, and a translation of a great number of words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs, from Javanese. I took notes in English, translating what I and my informant were saying as I went, but left expressions which were either peculiarly apt, peculiarly difficult to find English equivalents for on the spur of the moment, or were of technical importance to record, in Javanese. The result was a kind of field note pidgin which became rather more Javanese and less English as the period wore on, so that ultimately the notes become unreadable for anyone who does not know Javanese; a defect I have, I hope, removed in the text excerpts.
In formal informant interviews, and in many other cases, notes were taken at the moment. When, especially in certain kinds of informal contexts and certain kinds of meetings, etc., note-taking would alter the social situation, I wrote notes only afterwards, usually within an hour or so. Handwritten notes for one or two days were then typed, mainly at night, in a chronological fashion. A tape recorder was used for TAT’s and some other material, but because it is so much easier to put material on to such a recorder than to transcribe it off again, I did not use it very much in interviews as such.
As a result of this method of work there is perhaps less verbatim material in the notes than in those cases where the anthropologist works with an interpreter and records, electrically or by hand, the text and its translation, or demands a “literal” account from the interpreter. Much of my material is thus a paraphrase, or at least a somewhat catch-as-catch-can translation, of what the informant said rather than his exact words. When, however, quotation marks are put around an informant’s statement in the notes quoted above, it is, at least more or less, a literal, or close, translation of what he actually said, for I wrote down the Javanese. My own opinion is that whatever loss of accuracy is involved in non-verbatim translation it is more than compensated for in the increased quantity and variety of material one gets and the greater degree of naturalness and free-flow quality of the interview situation (it also has the virtue of not presenting as verbatim what is really paraphrase). But this is a debatable point, and for some sorts of material—myths, folktales, linguistic texts, etc.—verbatim transcription is of course essential, and was used here as well.
The final phase of the report was, then, the writing of it, a full-time occupation from October 1954 to August 1955, when I was employed as a research assistant at the Center for International Studies, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the sponsors of the project. Because of the joint nature of the project, and the division of labor into “aspects” for purposes of reporting, as well as because of the paucity of specific data of a modem anthropological sort on Java, it was decided by the members of the research team to write reports which were basically descriptive, rather than either comparative or explicitly theoretical in nature.
The above report, with a different introduction and conclusion, was submitted as a doctoral thesis to the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University in the Spring of 1956.