Hi, I'm Ryan Schram and this is a site for my anthropology teaching resources, notes and slide show presentations. Class discussion and lecture is always just a beginning. Whenever I post something here from one of my class lectures, I'll try to tie it to other things from class, other classes, and further resources on the topics and questions. In the future, I am hoping this will grow into a constantly-updated encyclopaedia of anthropology.

• ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world (Semester 2, 2024)
• ANTH 3621: Symbols: Forms, functions, failures (or, The anthropology of communication) (Semester 1, 2024)

• ANTH 1001: Introduction to anthropology (Semester 1, 2020)
• ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology (Semester 1, 2022)
• ANTH 2654: Forms of families (Semester 2, 2016)
• ANTH 2667: The anthropology of religion (Semester 1, 2017)
• ANTH 3601: Contemporary theory and anthropology (Semester 1, 2020)
• ANTH 3603: Melanesian worlds—Old and new (Semester 1, 2021)
• ANTH 4102: The anthropology of mind and experience (Semester 1, 2023)

• DVST 6901: Civil society and wellbeing (Semester 1, 2024)
• ANTH 6916: Culture and development—Key concepts (or, The social in justice) (Semester 2, 2024)

• The Quest, a guide to independent library research and writing prepared for ANTH 2667.
• A talk I gave to the University of Sydney anthropology department First Year Forum on what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork in March 2015.
• A talk I gave to high school students about anthropology visiting the University of Sydney in January 2015.
• A prepublication version of an encyclopedia article on religion and economy I wrote for the International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (2018).
• A longer version of a forthcoming article on translation which I wrote for the International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology.

• "Societies without scale, ontologies without mereologies, complexity contra modernity". A workshop presentation at the University of Sydney, November 22, 2024.
• "Lukim gud / Gudpela nius: The seeds of ethnographic citizenship in educational newspapers of postwar New Guinea". A presentation in the Governance Research Theme Works-in-Progress Workshop at the University of Sydney, May 24, 2024.
• "Staying in contact: Colonial encounter as constitutive fiction". Slides for a presentation in Strange intimacies: A Festschrift conference in honor of Neil Maclean at the University of Sydney on February 19, 2021.
• "'Sanguma em i stap (Sanguma is real)': Ethnographic citizenship and epistemic exclusion in Tok Pisin sorcery stories since 1945". Slides for presentation in the session “Making the occult public” at the 2019 meeting of the American Anthropological Association meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia on November 23.
• “The payback beat: Ethnographic citizenship and the public kinship of indigenous subjects in postcolonial Papua New Guinea.” Slides for a presentation given to The state and the dynamics of enslavement, a workshop held at Deakin University, February 13-15, 2019.
• “The tribe next door: The New Guinea Highlands in a postwar Papuan mission newspaper.” Slides for a talk given to the Oceanic Anthropologies seminar series at University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, May 8, 2018.
• “Taparoro: Missionary Translation and its Rivals in the Coral Sea Contact Zone.” Slides for a talk given at the ANU Anthropology Department seminar series on September 2, 2015.
• "Print prestations: The social embeddedness of reading publics in colonial Papua and New Guinea," a presentation of a paper in progress at the 2016 meeting of the Australian Anthropological Society.

The pages in this site are managed using a wiki, and so they are meant to be browsed using hyperlinks. Some of the pages are also displayed as slideshows using a system called S5. Presentations are stored as a single article in a page with a title, date and list of references. Unless otherwise noted, I am the author of the content here (for now, at least). While this site is aimed at students in my classes at the University of Sydney, if anyone else finds this information useful, please feel free to make use of it as a source, observing the CC-BY-SA license and the canons of scholarship and academic honesty (in other words, cite your sources).

The logo of this site is a picture of a mwali, one of two kinds of shell valuables used in Kula exchange in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. The picture comes from the record for “Shell Armlet, Papua New Guinea, Oceania.” 1933. Pitt-Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/LGweb/body/1933_40_18.htm.

Comments are welcome. Please get in touch by sending an email addressed to this web domain.