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At a Smithsonian summer program, veteran UA anthropologist Nancy Parezo guides graduate students through the little-used and often daunting territory of museum collections.

Museums have for centuries played an key role in managing the materials that define the myriad of cultures – past and present – around the world. And many of them have, over time, accumulated a lot of materials. The public displays in established museums, for example, usually feature only a tiny fraction of their collection.

For cultural anthropologists and other researchers, such collections can be a treasure trove for their research, but navigating through the sheer volume of accumulated artifacts stored away in museums can also be daunting.

"Museum, photographic and archival collections are some of the most underutilized research sources in cultural anthropology, primarily because graduate programs no longer provide training in collections-based research," said Nancy J. Parezo, a professor of American Indian studies and anthropology at the University of Arizona.

"As a result, scholars come to museums and are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of potential data. They have no idea where to begin or how to conduct efficient and rigorous research once they are familiar with an institution's records," she said.

For the past two years, Parezo and her colleague, Candace Greene, director of the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, or SIMA, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, have put together and run a competitive and intensive four-week training program for cultural anthropology graduate students to help them make sense of it all. They use the Smithsonian and its vast collections as an ethnographic field site.

"We concentrate on helping students work from their theoretical ideas to prepare for thesis or dissertation research using state-of-the-art, rigorous methodologies," Parezo said.

Catherine Nichols, a doctoral student at Arizona State University, is among those who have benefitted from the SIMA program. Parezo is also a member of her dissertation committee.

Nichols said her summer at SIMA gave her the detective skills she needed to navigate through the maze of card catalogs, data bases and papers that detail the whereabouts of collections, many of which are housed elsewhere besides the Smithsonian.

"I found my dissertation topic, conducted a pilot study using museum research methodologies (material and archival based) on my project and met a great deal of very helpful people," she said.

Parezo and Greene are preparing for their next summer session, the third of a three-year program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Three UA students will are included in this summer's cohort. Parezo and Greene also recruiting for future students.

SIMA accepts 12 students each year based on a competitive research proposal. The program provides free housing, a stipend and unlimited access to the Smithsonian and its millions of artifacts and hundreds of internationally known experts. Each student is provided with a mentor and given group and individualized training.

SIMA also trains master's and doctoral students in the critically important art of grant writing, where Parezo's excels. A former program officer at the National Science Foundation and an anthropologist who has been a panelists for dozens of federal and private foundations, Parezo has for years given workshops on grant writing, including many for the UA vice president for research.

"My job is to analyze research competition and teach these analytical skills to students. Obtaining funds for individual research is highly competitive, and the students who have gone through the first two SIMA programs already have almost an 80 percent success rate for dissertation grants and fellowships. This is much higher than the usual 20 to 30 percent success rate," Parezo said.

The course aims to revitalize museums as field sites of knowledge production for cultural anthropology – defined broadly and interdisciplinarily – through integrated teaching and research.

Parezo said this includes showing students how to connect important anthropological theories using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to find answers on topics ranging from materiality, nationalism, art, colonization and decolonization, trade and intercultural mediation, to cultural history, reproduction of cultural knowledge and cultural meaning while helping indigenous and source communities reconnect to their histories.

A second emphasis is on the impact and historical ramifications of collection and display for the contemporary world. Parezo, who completed her undergraduate and doctoral work at the UA, also ran the University's museum studies program for several years starting in 1982. She also has taught professional skills and grant writing classes since 1989.

In addition, Parezo has taught classes in cultural preservation and graduate research methodologies, worked for the Arizona Board of Regents and frequently gives workshops in the UA Graduate College and College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, as well as at other universities around the country. Currently she teaches helps American Indian communities research their cultural heritages that are housed in museums and archives.

"SIMA combines all my interests and helps the discipline and our source communities-research partners as well as my students prepare to be ethical and sophisticated researchers," she said.

More information about SIMA is on its website.