I was brought up about 70 km from Pamijahan, the site of my fieldwork. The traditions of this village are not totally unfamiliar to me. After the sunset maghrib prayers, the leader (imam) of the congregation in the small mosque where I lived in Kampung Benda, Tasikmalaya, often recited a ritual hadiyah. This is a chant presented as a gift to the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, to a wali, or to relatives who have passed away. The name of Shaykh Abdul Muhyi was one of the names recited in this ritual hadiyah. My family and neighbours occasionally went on pilgrimages to Pamijahan. I myself went to Pamijahan for the first time when I was an undergraduate student. Subsequently I went there several more times, accompanying colleagues and relatives as they undertook pilgrimages.

I came to Pamijahan for research in August 1996, initially spending almost seven months in the village. For the first three months, I stayed in a house belonging to the younger brother of a site custodian, a kuncen. However, in December 1996, I received a personal grant to do library research on Shaykh Abdul Muhyi’s manuscripts in Leiden, the Netherlands, for a month, and I left the village. In March 1997 I returned to Pamijahan for another three months. At this time, a young Pamijahan scholar, Kang Undang, a graduate of State Institute of Islamic Studies in Bandung (IAIN Sunan Gunung Jati) and an immediate descendant of Abdul Muhyi, offered me shelter.

The first three months of my fieldwork in Pamijahan were spent getting oriented, undertaking a census, making maps and conducting interviews, both open and structured, with pilgrims. I called my field strategy makan bubur panas, or “sipping hot rice porridge”. I started eating, as it were, from the edge, beginning with peripheral and marginal issues and proceeding gradually to the crucial, sacred and ‘hot’ topics in the village. I conducted my first interviews in Panyalahan, a fringe hamlet in the village complex of Pamijahan, and only later moved on to interviews in Pamijahan proper. In the view of villagers, Panyalahan is a less sacred site than Pamijahan. However, as I will discuss later, Panyalahan often challenges the authority of Pamijahan.

At this stage in my work, I had the opportunity to interview the old kuncen of Panyalahan as well as his predecessor. Both have now passed away. I also had access for the first time to Panyalahan’s sacred manuscripts. My reason for pursuing the makan bubur panas strategy was that I had to obtain a smooth entry to the village by first learning its various modes of signification without intruding into village affairs. For this reason I conducted only open interviews, allowing informants to talk as long as they wanted. I did not interrupt what they had to say unless there were technical reasons to do so.

For the next three months after I had gathered initial data from Panyalahan in the outer areas of Pamijahan, I focused on Pamijahan itself. For several reasons gathering data in Pamijahan was not easy. Some of prominent custodians, the kuncen or key bearers, had encountered bad experiences with students and university researchers who had come to the village a year before. They felt scrutinised, spied on, and disturbed by the bombardment of questions regarding the legitimacy of ziarah and the relationship of ziarah to Islamic doctrines. It is widely known that reformist Islamic organizations such as the Muhammadiyah and Persatuan Islam (Persis) do not agree with local ziarah practices in rural areas. Neither the kuncen nor the villagers wanted to be subjected to this endless delicate debate. Their reluctance to be drawn into such debates is not because they lack the knowledge to engage in them, but because, according to them, it would be a waste of time and disruptive to their lives. More than that, they later confessed to me that some researchers had removed certain written materials from the village. One kuncen asked me to go to Tasikmalaya to find a manuscript ‘borrowed’ four months before by a lecturer from the university in Tasikmalaya. Slowly I learned what to do and what not to do in the village.

So it was helpful not to ask difficult structured questions in the first stages of my fieldwork but rather to present myself as a student who wanted to know the teachings of the ancestors by allowing the villagers to perform as ‘teachers’. I did not make critical field notes in front of them but rather allowed the local people to teach and tell. However, I was learning about iconic, indexical, and symbolical signs through their stories, performances, rituals, and other socially recognised acts. Rather than provoking them with structured questions, I simply joined in their daily schedule.

Informants often invited me to go to chat and smoke with them in a small shelter in the neighbourhood called Batu Ngijing near the Pamijahan river. The villagers of Pamijahan are forbidden to smoke in the inner sacred territory of the village (see Chapter 5) so they move to a less sacred area to gather and relax after a day in the paddy fields or working as guides for pilgrims. This unassuming spot is important in village affairs. It has become an informal place of assembly where people discuss issues in their village. Thanks to my frequent presence in this place, I found myself often invited to the homes of key persons in local Sufi orders and in the guild of site custodians (pakuncenan).

The final stage of my fieldwork was quite different from the previous ones. I had to check the validity of some crucial categories. For me, this was the most challenging phase because now I had to provoke the villagers with a host of structured questions. It was at this stage that I asked for permission to attend Sufi rituals and received permission to see inside the tomb of Shaykh Abdul Muhyi. It was also at this stage that issues of precedence and contestation in village society became evident. This was the most difficult phase of my work because I had to understand this contestation without disturbing villagers’ daily activities. I also had to study a Sufi manual, a process that could only occur under the guidance of a Sufi master. In March 1997, I returned to Canberra but again in January 2000 went back to Pamijahan, updating my data and gathering new information from the village itself and from government offices in Tasikmalaya.

Essentially my research was an exercise in the implementation of, and testing of, a semiotic approach to the understanding of culture within the scholarly tradition initiated by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1839-1914). This meant pursuing the Peircean notion that signs have three key dimensions: representamen, referent and interpretant. I set out to collect data on the properties of representamens in Pamijahan. I then strove to comprehend their references based on the assumptions of the villagers. Finally, I tried to reach an understanding of the relationship between representamens and their reference within the complex discourse and interpretation of the interpretants there. This is the framework which informs the structure of the volume.