R Schram
Biographic Data
| ID | 11023 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Schram |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Schram |
| SIGNATURE | SCHRAM R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3544-3595 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
"Sanguma Em I Stap" (Sanguma Is Real)
In Papua New Guinea (PNG), citizenship rests on one's capacity to translate oneself. Political participation takes place in cultural contact zones, and public discourse circulates only when people create interfaces between disparate languages, systems of knowledge, and values. Yet these translations are not treated equally in mass print media. The uniquely ethnographic citizenship of PNG demands that people decide how their social identities rela…
Independent Declarations
Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin , a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of thes…
Translation
Unlike many philosophers of language and scholars of translation, linguistic anthropologists see translation practices as both ubiquitous and necessary to communication, and one of many different kinds of metalinguistic capacities that all languages must possess. The anthropological study of translation has attended to what particular societies' ideas about translation reveal about their ideological conception of linguistic difference and its rel…
The rights of the dead
Religion and Economy
Classical social theories of society, culture, and change are, in a certain light, a debate over how to interpret the intersection of religious beliefs and values with economic behavior. In considering this question, theorists have built various frameworks for the individual and collective dimensions of social behavior and for the nature of modernity. Contemporary social theory has also been reinvigorated by the continuing vitality and diversity …
The tribe next door
Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced. Papuan Times , a newspaper published by …
The Empty Seashell
Birds Will Cover the Sky
This article examines how the people of Auhelawa, a society on the south coast of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea, make use of two historical figures—one a warrior, the other a police officer—to represent the nature of social transformation. In different ways, the stories of these heroes produce a dichotomous temporality of a time of war and a time of peace and thereby frame different kinds of sociopolitical institutions as inverted moral types…
Indecorous, Too Hasty, Incorrect
Malinowski quotes a typical Kiriwina man in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: "He conducts his Kula as if it were gimwali" (1932 [1922]:96). This analysis of the difference between ceremonial exchange and barter-not Malinowski's, but his informant's-is one reason Trobriand kula practices resonate with so many. In this article, I suggest one consider the informant's statement as an action, rather than description, and an attempt to construe who is…
Engaging with Strangers
Notes on the Sociology of Wantoks in Papua New Guinea
In Melanesian pidgin languages, wantok means someone with a similar origin as oneself, and connotes a familiarity and mutual solidarity. Wantok has also become a watchword of politics and elite discourse on the Pacific Islands' political and social development, where it is a figure of corruption, clientelism, and the lingering influence of tribal identity. Even among grassroots people, wantok sociality is common, especially in urban places, but w…
A society divided
Christianity invites one to consider it as an antisocial and disembedding force, in particular as hostile to tradition and hostile to collective modes of life. Colonial-era evangelists to Papua New Guinea (PNG) called on people to break traditional rules and, in their words, come out of the darkness. It has thus been productive to examine Christianity and tradition in terms of a confrontation of two incompatible systems, indeed, two incommensurat…
Only the names have changed
Indigeneity is becoming a more important way for the rural communities of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to represent identity, as it is in many other parts of the world. Anthropologists have largely been critical of the essentialism of indigenous identities, and describe indigeneity as an emerging consciousness of the denial of sovereignty. I argue that Dumont's distinction between dialectic and differentiation as alternative ways to think about social …
One mind
This article examines the relationship between C hristian worship and the production of religious identity among A uhelawa speakers of N ormanby I sland, P apua N ew G uinea. A uhelawa people live in a society in which a locally developed form of C hristianity has emerged from a long engagement with missionaries. In the colonial era, missionaries spoke in terms of light and darkness to mediate their contradictory aims of both authentic personal c…
Liana Chua, The Christianity of Culture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Anthropology’s Global Histories
The Border in the Eye of the Beholder
The Border in the Eye of the Beholder: Interculturalism in the Pacific Ryan Schram Niko Besnier, On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 328 pp. Paige West, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 336 pp. Danilyn Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West P…
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Kinship and Beyond
Review of Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. Sandra Bamford and James Leach, eds. 2009. Berghahn Books, New York. 292 pp., 21 illustrations, bibliography, index. $95.00 (hardback). ISBN 9781845454227
Witches' wealth
The argument that contemporary examples of witchcraft belief demonstrate an alternative form of modern subjectivity has been doubted by many anthropologists, who claim that so-called modern witchcraft is often only a reflection of traditional cultural epistemologies. In Auhelawa (Milne Bay province, Papua New Guinea), new beliefs about witchcraft suggest that the epistemic basis for knowledge is changing. Auhelawa believe that Western society and…
Finding Money
There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The compa…
Consequences of Contact
Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies . Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin , eds. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2007 . ix + 234 pp. In the region of Oceania, a long and complex history of intercultural contacts has led to a vast diversity of interlingual relationships. In an effort to bring greater understanding to these phenomena, Makihara and Schieffelin present eight cases …
The Severed Snake
Kuehling, Susanne
Anthropos , Seite 271 - 272
Sit, Cook, Eat, Full Stop
The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of ‘custom’ in favor of a practice of ‘Christian custom’ in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper …
Witches' wealth
The argument that contemporary examples of witchcraft belief demonstrate an alternative form of modern subjectivity has been doubted by many anthropologists, who claim that so-called modern witchcraft is often only a reflection of traditional cultural epistemologies. In Auhelawa (Milne Bay province, Papua New Guinea), new beliefs about witchcraft suggest that the epistemic basis for knowledge is changing. Auhelawa believe that Western society and…
Finding Money
There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The compa…
A society divided
Christianity invites one to consider it as an antisocial and disembedding force, in particular as hostile to tradition and hostile to collective modes of life. Colonial-era evangelists to Papua New Guinea (PNG) called on people to break traditional rules and, in their words, come out of the darkness. It has thus been productive to examine Christianity and tradition in terms of a confrontation of two incompatible systems, indeed, two incommensurat…
Indecorous, Too Hasty, Incorrect
Malinowski quotes a typical Kiriwina man in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: "He conducts his Kula as if it were gimwali" (1932 [1922]:96). This analysis of the difference between ceremonial exchange and barter-not Malinowski's, but his informant's-is one reason Trobriand kula practices resonate with so many. In this article, I suggest one consider the informant's statement as an action, rather than description, and an attempt to construe who is…
Notes on the Sociology of Wantoks in Papua New Guinea
In Melanesian pidgin languages, wantok means someone with a similar origin as oneself, and connotes a familiarity and mutual solidarity. Wantok has also become a watchword of politics and elite discourse on the Pacific Islands' political and social development, where it is a figure of corruption, clientelism, and the lingering influence of tribal identity. Even among grassroots people, wantok sociality is common, especially in urban places, but w…
Only the names have changed
Indigeneity is becoming a more important way for the rural communities of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to represent identity, as it is in many other parts of the world. Anthropologists have largely been critical of the essentialism of indigenous identities, and describe indigeneity as an emerging consciousness of the denial of sovereignty. I argue that Dumont's distinction between dialectic and differentiation as alternative ways to think about social …
Birds Will Cover the Sky
This article examines how the people of Auhelawa, a society on the south coast of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea, make use of two historical figures—one a warrior, the other a police officer—to represent the nature of social transformation. In different ways, the stories of these heroes produce a dichotomous temporality of a time of war and a time of peace and thereby frame different kinds of sociopolitical institutions as inverted moral types…
Liana Chua, The Christianity of Culture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The tribe next door
Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced. Papuan Times , a newspaper published by …
Sit, Cook, Eat, Full Stop
The Auhelawa people of Normanby Island (Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea) typically observe the death of an individual through a series of feasts in which the lineage of the deceased and its lateral relatives exchange food and perform rituals of mourning. Recently, a number of people have decided to reject all forms of ‘custom’ in favor of a practice of ‘Christian custom’ in which no food is exchanged and no rituals are performed. This paper …
The Severed Snake
Kuehling, Susanne
Anthropos , Seite 271 - 272
Consequences of Contact
Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies . Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin , eds. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2007 . ix + 234 pp. In the region of Oceania, a long and complex history of intercultural contacts has led to a vast diversity of interlingual relationships. In an effort to bring greater understanding to these phenomena, Makihara and Schieffelin present eight cases …
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Kinship and Beyond
Review of Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. Sandra Bamford and James Leach, eds. 2009. Berghahn Books, New York. 292 pp., 21 illustrations, bibliography, index. $95.00 (hardback). ISBN 9781845454227
Witches' wealth
The argument that contemporary examples of witchcraft belief demonstrate an alternative form of modern subjectivity has been doubted by many anthropologists, who claim that so-called modern witchcraft is often only a reflection of traditional cultural epistemologies. In Auhelawa (Milne Bay province, Papua New Guinea), new beliefs about witchcraft suggest that the epistemic basis for knowledge is changing. Auhelawa believe that Western society and…
Finding Money
There is a growing consensus that money and the market principle have not led to a great transformation into modernity. Rather, market exchange is everywhere socially embedded. But what does this embedding consist of, structural limits, tactics of resistance, or moral boundaries? Auhelawa (Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea) have incorporated money into their local economy in a variety of ways which keep the logic of the market in check. The compa…
Anthropology’s Global Histories
The Border in the Eye of the Beholder
The Border in the Eye of the Beholder: Interculturalism in the Pacific Ryan Schram Niko Besnier, On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 328 pp. Paige West, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 336 pp. Danilyn Rutherford, Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West P…
One mind
This article examines the relationship between C hristian worship and the production of religious identity among A uhelawa speakers of N ormanby I sland, P apua N ew G uinea. A uhelawa people live in a society in which a locally developed form of C hristianity has emerged from a long engagement with missionaries. In the colonial era, missionaries spoke in terms of light and darkness to mediate their contradictory aims of both authentic personal c…
Liana Chua, The Christianity of Culture
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Only the names have changed
Indigeneity is becoming a more important way for the rural communities of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to represent identity, as it is in many other parts of the world. Anthropologists have largely been critical of the essentialism of indigenous identities, and describe indigeneity as an emerging consciousness of the denial of sovereignty. I argue that Dumont's distinction between dialectic and differentiation as alternative ways to think about social …
Notes on the Sociology of Wantoks in Papua New Guinea
In Melanesian pidgin languages, wantok means someone with a similar origin as oneself, and connotes a familiarity and mutual solidarity. Wantok has also become a watchword of politics and elite discourse on the Pacific Islands' political and social development, where it is a figure of corruption, clientelism, and the lingering influence of tribal identity. Even among grassroots people, wantok sociality is common, especially in urban places, but w…
A society divided
Christianity invites one to consider it as an antisocial and disembedding force, in particular as hostile to tradition and hostile to collective modes of life. Colonial-era evangelists to Papua New Guinea (PNG) called on people to break traditional rules and, in their words, come out of the darkness. It has thus been productive to examine Christianity and tradition in terms of a confrontation of two incompatible systems, indeed, two incommensurat…
Birds Will Cover the Sky
This article examines how the people of Auhelawa, a society on the south coast of Normanby Island, Papua New Guinea, make use of two historical figures—one a warrior, the other a police officer—to represent the nature of social transformation. In different ways, the stories of these heroes produce a dichotomous temporality of a time of war and a time of peace and thereby frame different kinds of sociopolitical institutions as inverted moral types…
Indecorous, Too Hasty, Incorrect
Malinowski quotes a typical Kiriwina man in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: "He conducts his Kula as if it were gimwali" (1932 [1922]:96). This analysis of the difference between ceremonial exchange and barter-not Malinowski's, but his informant's-is one reason Trobriand kula practices resonate with so many. In this article, I suggest one consider the informant's statement as an action, rather than description, and an attempt to construe who is…
Engaging with Strangers
The Empty Seashell
Religion and Economy
Classical social theories of society, culture, and change are, in a certain light, a debate over how to interpret the intersection of religious beliefs and values with economic behavior. In considering this question, theorists have built various frameworks for the individual and collective dimensions of social behavior and for the nature of modernity. Contemporary social theory has also been reinvigorated by the continuing vitality and diversity …
The tribe next door
Western ideologies of imperialism conceptualise time as heterogeneous in that they assume that colonised lands are outside of historical time. In this respect, the discursive construction of an empty frontier has been crucial to colonial dispossession. Yet colonial discourses become dominant through their circulation, and so the savage spaces they imagine take on a life of their own when they are revoiced. Papuan Times , a newspaper published by …
Translation
Unlike many philosophers of language and scholars of translation, linguistic anthropologists see translation practices as both ubiquitous and necessary to communication, and one of many different kinds of metalinguistic capacities that all languages must possess. The anthropological study of translation has attended to what particular societies' ideas about translation reveal about their ideological conception of linguistic difference and its rel…
The rights of the dead
Independent Declarations
Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin , a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of thes…
"Sanguma Em I Stap" (Sanguma Is Real)
In Papua New Guinea (PNG), citizenship rests on one's capacity to translate oneself. Political participation takes place in cultural contact zones, and public discourse circulates only when people create interfaces between disparate languages, systems of knowledge, and values. Yet these translations are not treated equally in mass print media. The uniquely ethnographic citizenship of PNG demands that people decide how their social identities rela…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · History (9 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (9 works)