Ethnological Museum

▪ museum, Berlin, Germany

German  Ethnologisches Museum 

      museum in Berlin, housing one of the world's largest and most comprehensive ethnographic collections. Together with the Museum of Asian Art and the Museum of European Cultures, the Ethnological Museum is considered one of the Dahlem museums, because of its location in the Dahlem district. It is one of the National Museums of Berlin.

      The Ethnological Museum features objects from pre-industrial societies—notably North American Indians (American Indian)—with a focus on non-European cultures. The origins of the collection date to as far back as the 17th century; its roots are in the Cabinet of Art and Rarities, which was assembled by the electors of Brandenburg, and the later Royal Prussian Art Cabinet, from which an “ethnographic collection” was derived in 1829. The Ethnological Museum, founded in 1873, was destroyed in World War II. The objects that survived eventually found a permanent home in 1970.

      The museum contains more than 500,000 objects from around the globe as well as a great many recordings, films, and photographs. Other noteworthy segments of the collection display American archaeology, South Sea cultures, objects from East Asia, and African art (art, African). The American archaeology exhibit features the pre-Columbian peoples of Central (American Indian) and South America (American Indian). The North American Indian collection presents historical and contemporary Native American cultures. The South Sea exhibit treats Melanesian (Melanesian culture) and Australian (Australian Aborigine) peoples and cultures (arts, Oceanic). The East Asia exhibit focuses on daily life in imperial China and on Japanese folk art. The collection of African art traces the development of African art and its misunderstanding or misidentification in the hands of colonial Europeans. The music ethnology exhibition, which opened in 2007, features 16,000 original phonograph recordings dating back to 1900, along with 2,000 shellac (pre-vinyl) recordings and many tens of thousands of digital recordings.

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