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This is a list of museums with major collections in ethnography and anthropology. It is sorted by descending number of objects listed.
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with particular focus on the ethnography and archaeology of the Americas. The museum is caretaker to over 1.2 million objects, some 900 feet (270 m) of documents, 2,000 maps and site plans, and about 500,000 photographs. The museum is located at Divinity Avenue on the Harvard University campus. The museum is one of the four Harvard Museums of Science and Culture open to the public.
The Musée de l'Homme is an anthropology museum in Paris, France. It was established in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. It is the descendant of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, founded in 1878. The Musée de l'Homme is a research center under the authority of various ministries, and it groups several entities from the CNRS. The Musée de l'Homme is one of the seven departments of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. The Musée de l'Homme occupies most of the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot in the 16th arrondissement. The vast majority of its collection was transferred to the Quai Branly museum.
The Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, located in Paris, France, is a museum designed by French architect Jean Nouvel to feature the indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The museum collection comprises more than a million objects, of which 3,500 are on display at any given time, in both permanent and temporary thematic exhibits. A selection of objects from the museum is also displayed in the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre.
Most African sculpture from regions south of the Sahara was historically made of wood and other organic materials that have not survived from earlier than a few centuries ago, while older pottery figures are found from a number of areas. Masks are important elements in the art of many peoples, along with human figures, often highly stylized. There is a vast variety of styles, often varying within the same context of origin depending on the use of the object, but wide regional trends are apparent; sculpture is most common among "groups of settled cultivators in the areas drained by the Niger and Congo rivers" in West Africa. Direct images of African deities are relatively infrequent, but masks in particular are or were often made for traditional African religious ceremonies; today many are made for tourists as "airport art". African masks were an influence on European Modernist art, which was inspired by their lack of concern for naturalistic depiction.
The Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography or N.N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology is a Russian institute of research, specializing in ethnographic studies of cultural and physical anthropology. The institute is a constituent institute of the History branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with its main building on Leninsky Prospekt, Moscow. The institute is named after the 19th century ethnologist and anthropologist Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay.
The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin are a group of institutions in Berlin, Germany, comprising seventeen museums in five clusters; several research institutes; libraries; and supporting facilities. They are overseen by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and funded by the German federal government in collaboration with Germany's federal states. The central complex on Museum Island was added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1999. By 2007, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin had grown into the largest complex of museums in Europe. The museum was originally founded by King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in 1823 as the Königliche Museen.
The Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv is a collection of ethnomusicological recordings or world music, mostly on phonographic cylinders, assembled since 1900 in Berlin, Germany by the institution of the same name.
The Weltmuseum in Vienna is the largest anthropological museum in Austria, established in 1876. It is housed in a wing of the Hofburg Imperial Palace and holds a collection of more than 400,000 ethnographical and archaeological objects from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America.
The Ethnological Museum of Berlin is one of the Berlin State Museums, the de facto national collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is presently located in the Humboldt Forum in Mitte, along with the Museum of Asian Art. The museum holds more than 500,000 objects and is one of the largest and most important collections of works of art and culture from outside Europe in the world. Its highlights include important objects from the Sepik River, Hawaii, the Kingdom of Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania, China, the Pacific Coast of North America, Mesoamerica, the Andes, as well as one of the first ethnomusicology collections of sound recordings.
The Musée de Tahiti et des Îles, Tahitian Te Fare Manaha, is the national museum of French Polynesia, located in Puna'auia, Tahiti.
Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum is an international project with the goal to publish all existing Etruscan bronze mirrors. The first three volumes were published in 1981. A total of thirty-six fascicles has been produced.
The Museum of European Cultures – National Museums in Berlin – Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation came from the unification of the Europe-Department in the Berlin Museum of Ethnography and the Berlin Museum for Folklore in 1999. The museum focuses on the lived-in world of Europe and European culture contact, predominantly in Germany from the 18th Century until today.
Museum anthropology is a domain of scholarship and professional practice in the discipline of anthropology.
Some African objects had been collected by Europeans for centuries, and there had been industries producing some types, especially carvings in ivory, for European markets in some coastal regions. Between 1890 and 1918 the volume of objects greatly increased as Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums and private collections in Europe and the United States. About 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is believed to be located in Europe, according to French art historians.
Paul Hambruch was a German ethnologist and folklorist.
Nils Seethaler is a German cultural anthropologist. He researches historical collections of ethnological objects and human remains.
The Solomon Islands National Museum is the national museum of the Solomon Islands and is located in Honiara. It is a department of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
John Mack FBA FSA is a British social anthropologist and art historian specialising in African arts and cultures. He is an academic and former museum curator.