DSpace Repository

Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology

 

The Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) is offered by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. The program seeks to promote broader and more effective use of museum collections in anthropological research.

This Repository and many of the materials it provides were developed with support from the National Science Foundation under award #BCS 1424029.

Contact: SIMA@si.edu

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode

Recent Submissions

  • Museum Studies in Anthropology 
    Berk, Christopher D. (Auburn University and Smithsonian Institution in Museum Anthropology, 2020)
    This course presents “the museum” as an object of ethnographic inquiry, examining it as a social institution embedded within a larger field of cultural heritage that is perpetually under negotiation. We reflect on how ...
  • Materiality: The Anthropology of Things 
    Bell, Joshua A. (Smithsonian Institution in Museum Anthropology, 2021)
    Where do things begin and end? What are the role of things in our everyday lives? The things that we make, use, discard, admire, hate and struggle to understand have long been explicit and or implicit topics of anthropological ...
  • Visual Anthropology: the Social Lives of Images 
    Bell, Joshua A. (Smithsonian Institution in Museum Anthropology, 2022)
    A cultural practice with no fixed outcome, making images occupies an intriguing place in our world. Not only do many of us make images daily but we are surrounded by them and consume them on smart phones, computers and ...
  • Anthropological Histories: the Politics and Poetics of the Past 
    Bell, Joshua A. (Smithsonian Institution in Museum Anthropology, 2020)
    This seminar engages with the work of a wide range of scholars – anthropologists, historians and philosophers – who have collectively grappled with what history and how it is cultural constituted. With the rejection of the ...
  • Museum and Material Culture Research 
    Nichols, Catherine (Loyola University Chicago and Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2020)
    This undergraduate course is an anthropology elective at Loyola University Chicago. It relies on the use of objects from the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection, a research and teaching collection. Originally conceptualized ...
  • Collections Research Practicum in Cultural Anthropology 
    Shannon, Jen (University of Colorado, Boulder and Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2019)
    This course introduces students to collections research and exhibition content. The goal is to engage students in independent research and provide opportunities for them to think critically about collection and interpretation ...
  • Curatorship 
    Jackson, Jason Baird (Indiana University and Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2017)
    What do curators do? What hands-on skills should a graduate student acquire in order to prepare for a career working in museums or similar cultural heritage archives? How do the theoretical debates within various humanities ...
  • Advanced Seminar in Museological Problems 
    Wood, W. Warner; Lurie, Nancy (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Smithsonian Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2017)
    This course is an elective for museum studies students that also meets an “advanced seminar” requirement for the Anthropology Masters and Ph.D. Graduate Programs. This course is an elective for museum studies students that ...
  • Introduction to Cultural Anthropology and Human Diversity 
    Stambach, Amy (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2018)
    This is an undergraduate course for non-anthropology majors that fulfills a general education requirement. For many students, this is the only anthropology class they will take. The course rotates among three or four ...
  • Anthropology in the Museum 
    Greene, Candace (George Washington University and Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, 2018)
    This is a graduate seminar that meets once a week for two hours. In addition to grad students from Anthropology, there are usually students from Museum Studies and sometimes from Museum Education. Classwork with these ...