Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

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The Smithsonian Institution Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) trains graduate students t

The Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) is a research training program offered by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. The program seeks to promote broader and more effective use of museum collections in anthropological research by providing a supplement to university training. Each summer SIMA supports 10-12 graduate students who want to use collections in their research. Using Smithsonian collections, experts, and visiting faculty, SIMA:

• introduces students to the scope of collections and their potential as data
• provides training in appropriate methods to collect and analyze museum data
• makes participants aware of a range of theoretical issues relating to collections
• positions students to apply their knowledge within their home university

The curriculum, including both seminars and hands-on workshops, teaches students how to navigate museum systems, select methods to examine and analyze museum specimens, and recognize the wealth of theoretical issues that museum data can address. For more information on SIMA visit: http://anthropology.si.edu/summerinstitute

We hope you’ll contribute to this interactive forum and to our ongoing conversation about the work we do to further the Smithsonian's mission to increase and diffuse knowledge. SIMA is supported by a series of grants from the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation under the following grant numbers: BCS1424029, BCS1127060, BCS1039499, BCS0852511, BCS0806775

While on-topic discussion is encouraged, we ask that you express yourself in a civil manner and treat other users with respect. The Smithsonian also monitors and may remove posts consistent with its terms of use, as described at http://si.edu/Termsofuse -gen.

10/20/2026

How can collaborative media production support community access to their belongings in museum collections? In her lesson “Making Connections: Collaboration Research-Creation as a Method for Decolonial Curation”, visiting faculty and SIMA advisory board member Kate Hennessy (Simon Fraser University, School of Interactive Arts and Technology) shared examples of projects she has co-produced over the last 15 years for a discussion with students on how collections can be remediated and recontextualized in virtual and physical exhibition to support local knowledge continuity.

10/19/2026

A critical element of engaging with belongings in museums is understanding the technology around taking images. Human Dignity provenance researcher and cultural anthropologist Jacqueline Hazen shared her knowledge and experiences about using a photographic studio to document belongings with a camera in the Anthropology Department's photo studio.

10/16/2026

Faculty fellow, Dr. Ruth Toulson entered SIMA to focus on bringing more collection-based teaching to her undergraduate students at MICA. She examines a North Indian quilt (catalog no. E399356) during a lesson taught by Dr. Sowparnika Balaswaminathan. While teaching in anthropology classrooms often begins with texts, Toulson asks “What happens if, instead, we begin with close examination of belongings in museum collections?”

10/15/2026

Sowparnika began her final lesson - Narrative and its Discontents: The Ethics of Representing Representation - with a “present your problem” exercise in which the interns describe a “problem” they are confronting in their research. They are asked to consider possible contexts and metanarratives and then move on to looking at the objects under question.

10/14/2026

Dorothy Lippert (Repatriation Program Manager, NMNH) presented on the integration of Indigenous Science with Western Science in the transforming context of repatriation in the US and work at the National Museum of Natural History. She discussed how Indigenous perspectives open up museums to different ways of understanding the belongings that are stewarded, what care and protocol is needed in conducting research, and what sort of questions should be asked.

10/12/2026

Sowparnika’s second lesson - Follow that bronze! Object itineraries and spatio-temporal landscapes - explored how the lonely object is in fact in the midst of a network of relations and is a seasoned traveler (arguably unwilling most times). Interns analyzed a set of objects belonging to the same “type” to plot their itineraries.

10/09/2026

Matt Capps (University of Pennsylvania) is looking at Choctaw baskets collected by Adrien Rouquette in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana in 1876 for the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. He is interested in the choices of cane varieties and dyes used by weavers from the many communities in southern Louisiana over the past century and a half. Today, canebrakes where these materials grow are endangered ecosystems and basket makers are working to restore these ecosystems and continue their basket-making traditions.

10/08/2026

What are the global contexts that produce collections? How can collections and archives explain transnational politics? Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (Concordia University, SIMA 2016 alum)’s first lesson - Collections and Contexts: Politics, Scale, and Theory - traced how the local and the global can be mediated through objects and collections in the museum, and students worked with a collection to find the larger political formations implicated.

10/07/2026

Madi Becker (Indiana University) is looking at a Miao album from S.W. China collected in the late 20th century. She is interested in ethnic minority textiles from S.W. China. The Miao album is a genre of illustrated manuscripts largely produced in the 18th century during the Qing dynasty in China. The illustrations in the album show historical examples of Miao dress, as well as the actual process of textile making. There are about 180 total surviving albums worldwide.

10/06/2026

Joshua Bell (NMNH) discussed in a series of case studies the dynamics of how belongings were obtained from communities in Oceania (Torres Straits, Lake Murray, Ok Tedi, Buka, Efate) from 1880s to 1928. A key aspect of this lesson is to get students to think through the various agencies involved from the Indigenous communities, collectors, infrastructures used to enter and move through the territories, the materials brought to exchange and the belongings themselves. Through these cases, Bell works to help interns think more inclusively about how collections are made and the silences of museum records.

Address

1000 Constitution Avenue NW
Washington D.C., DC
20013

Telephone

+12026331952

Website

http://anthropology.si.edu/summerinstitute/

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