Ryan Schram Yawahigu ana amwahao Ol rot bilong laip bilong mi (or, Curriculum vitae)
Yauwedo (Hello)
My research seeks to understand the theories people create to explain their own societies and why their societies change. My early research focused on the meaning of history in Auhelawa, an indigenous society in Papua New Guinea (PNG). My current projects deal with the development of news journalism in colonial and postcolonial PNG, and how journalists create public knowledge of difference that makes PNG’s experiments in ethnographic citizenship possible. Feel free to read more here or get in touch.
About the author
Ryan Schram is a cultural anthropologist and author of Harvests, Feasts, and Graves: Postcultural Consciousness in Contemporary Papua New Guinea (Cornell, 2018). He teaches on kinship, religion, and social theory.
Currently
Star Trek is one of the few parts of pop culture where anthropology still has prestige. March 12, 2022 at 10:24 AM
Selected writings
“Sanguma em i stap (Sanguma is real)”: Sorcery stories and the ethnographic citizenship of Tok Pisin print journalism
Current Anthropology 64(1) (2023)Independent declarations: Attributions of peoplehood in news narratives
Signs and Society 10(3): 287–313 (2022)The compensation page News narratives of public kinship in Papua New Guinea print journalism
The Contemporary Pacific 34(1): 63–94 (2022)Translation
The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, edited by James Stanlaw. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. (2020)The rights of the dead (A book symposium comment on Erik Mueggler’s Songs for dead parents [2017])
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(3): 1109–1112 (2020)The tribe next door: The New Guinea Highlands in a postwar Papuan mission newspaper
The Australian Journal of Anthropology 30(1): 18–34 (2019)Harvests, Feasts, and Graves: Postcultural Consciousness in Contemporary Papua New Guinea
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press (2018)“Tapwaroro is true”: Indigenous voice and the heteroglossia of Methodist missionary translation in British New Guinea
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(3): 259–277 (2016)Indecorous, Too Hasty, Incorrect: Market and Moral Imagination in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea
Anthropological Quarterly 89(2): 515–537 (2016)Birds Will Cover the Sky: Humiliation and Meaning in Two Historical Narratives from Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea
Ethnohistory 63(1): 95–117 (2016)Featured notes
Strange intimacies, a Festschrift conference in honor of Neil Maclean will be online on February 19
February 02, 2021The charisma of the coronavirus: Teaching cultural critique in a global emergency
May 25, 2020On John Chau: North Sentinel Island and the secular sacred of uncontacted peoples
December 04, 2018A New Government Breaks With The Past in The Papua New Guinea Parliament’s “Haus Tambaran”
February 10, 2014Frontier, colony, pre-border: PNG’s latest role in Australian sovereignty
December 31, 2013Key words
- anthropology (9)
- Auhelawa (4)
- belief (5)
- change (7)
- Christianity (18)
- church (2)
- citizenship (3)
- colonialism (11)
- computing (2)
- Covid-19 (2)
- culture (2)
- death (6)
- discourse (7)
- ethnicity (2)
- exchange (6)
- feasts (3)
- fieldwork (2)
- food (4)
- gift (2)
- heteroglossia (2)
- history (11)
- interlingualism (2)
- kinship (8)
- language (6)
- libraries (2)
- magic (6)
- market (2)
- media (16)
- memorials (2)
- migration (2)
- missions (3)
- money (6)
- mourning (4)
- newspapers (12)
- occult (7)
- Oceania (2)
- ontology (2)
- Pacific (3)
- Papua New Guinea (31)
- personhood (4)
- photographs (2)
- police (2)
- politics (3)
- race (3)
- reciprocity (2)
- religion (4)
- review (3)
- ritual (7)
- scholarship (4)
- seminar (2)
- Solomon Islands (2)
- sorcery (5)
- sovereignty (2)
- state (4)
- teaching (2)
- translation (4)
- urbanization (2)
- value (8)
- violence (2)
- wantok (3)
- wantoks (2)
- witchcraft (4)
- writing (2)