Museum of Ethnography

About

The Museum of Ethnography (Swedish: Etnografiska museet), in Stockholm, Sweden, is a Swedish science museum. It houses a collection of about 220,000 items relating to the ethnography, or cultural anthropology, of peoples from around the world, including from China, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific region, the Americas and Africa. The museum is situated in Museiparken at Gärdet in Stockholm.

Since 1999, it is a part of Swedish National Museums of World Culture and is also hosting the Sven Hedin Foundation. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday 11:00AM – 5:00 PM, and Wednesdays 11:00 AM – 8:00 PM and is closed on Mondays. Among the oldest collections at the museum are objects gathered in the Swedish colony New Sweden and during the Cook expeditions in the 18th century.

However, the main part stems from the period 1850–1950 and is heavily influenced by the colonial era explorations, evangelisations and trade. From 1874 on, the curator of the vertebrae collections at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, zoologist Fredrik Adam Smitt (1839-1904) was made responsible for the ethnographic collections. In 1900 Hjalmar Stolpe became the first director of the newly founded Museum...