![This is a close-up shot of a vibrant graffiti mural on a brick wall, divided into two distinct horizontal sections of abstract, calligraphic-style art; the lower two-thirds of the mural features thick, flowing, and overlapping lines in a deep raspberry red, outlined in black and highlighted with strokes of bright lime green, creating a sense of depth and energetic movement, while the upper third consists of a more dense and intricate pattern of thinner, interwoven lines in shades of purple, white, and black [gen AI description].](/media/wall.jpg)
Human experience practically writes itself. A detail of a mural painted by Alex “Defer” Kizu for Pow!Wow! 2020, a street art exhibition in Honolulu.
- In files of author, 2023
Hi, I’m Ryan Schram and this is a site for my anthropology teaching resources, notes, slide show presentations, details of my research publications, and other things.
Anthrograph: Not just another encyclopaedia of anthropology
For over ten years, I maintained a site called the Anthrocyclopedia (paedia?).1 When I created it, I wrote on the home page, “In the future, I am hoping this will grow into a constantly-updated encyclopaedia of anthropology.” Well that never really happened, but instead it became a home mainly for lecture outlines that could be automatically converted into HTML/CSS/JS slideshows. The content grew and grew, but that site was also very reliant on community-contributed plugins to the Dokuwiki project. Now, finally, I’m rebooting. This is a brand new site, with brand new software to maintain it. Welcome, feel free to browse (and beware of bugs).
How is the information here organized?
Like the old web site, the pages in this site are managed using a wiki, and so they are meant to be browsed using hyperlinks. The new software has also allowed to add some new features. The point is the same: Don’t ask too many questions about how this is all organized. It’s messy but somehow it works. 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
I’m not sure about the logo…
The logo of my older 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.
Get in touch
Comments are welcome. Please get in touch by sending an email addressed to this web domain.
Embarrassingly—and quite contrary to the spirit of a wiki—I don’t even actually know when I created Anthrocyclopaedia because I had to restart the site from a backup after at least a few years when a software upgrade failed. I guess I’m not a very good web master.↩︎