Dancing on Heaven's Door Research Paper, Page 2

Choosing a Topic to Study

If you do not already have a topic related to religion and ritual to research in mind, these resources might help you find one. Start with with home page of the King Library. From the navigation list on the left you can choose SJSU Subject Guides . Under this heading you can choose "Social Science." If you select Anthropology, you will be taken to Bernice Redfern's anthropology resources page. Two extremely valuable areas of her site are Articles and Databases and Books and E-Books. Yet another way to get information for your paper is to go directly to Religious Studies from the SJSU Subject Guides.
age. This provides you with an extensive list of cross-disciplinary resources related to religion. If you are interested in the religion of a particular group of people, some good places to explore are the following:

• Cultural Survival (“promoting the rights, voices, and visions of indigenous peoples”)
• The Library of Congress' Global Gateway
• Countries and Their Cultures
• Aboriginal Links International
• Yahoo's World Culture List
• Archeolink Anthropology

You should bear a few things in mind:

• Remember that you must select a topic related to the related living culture. For instance, you cannot write exclusively about the religion of the ancient Maya, but you can write about the history of Mayan religion as it relates to the indigenous Mayan people of modern Mesoamerica.
• Language is a primary identifier of ethnicity. If the group you are choosing does not speak a common language, you may have selected too large a group.
• There are alternate spellings for the names of many indigenous cultures. Check Ethnologue.com for variations on the name of your culture. For example, the language of many indigenous people in Peru is Quechua, but it is also spelled Qheswa. Knowing alternative spelling will make your information searches more complete.

Choose several topics you might be interested in researching, in case you cannot find enough information on your first choice. The only way to determine whether or not you will have enough information to do your research report is to start checking for sources, so proceed to page 3.