Paper short abstract:

Many anthropology museums have been founded more than once. Their creation involved three or more stages from royal cabinets to ethnographic museums or museums of ethnology. Others are connected to a university. What was ethnographic about them and why were some of them reinvented as world museums?

Paper long abstract:

Comparative research on the history of anthropology, ethnography and ethnology, summarized in Before Boas, indicates that many anthropology museums have more than one date of origin. The Ethnographic Museum of St. Petersburg became independent in 1836, the first with such a name worldwide, but remained within the Imperial Kunstkamera, founded in 1714, in which it had been developed during the eighteenth century. The ethnological museum of Berlin was founded in 1873, opened its doors in 1886, but its collections go back to the sixteenth-century Royal Prussian Kunstkammer. Likewise, the museums of Munich and Vienna treasure Renaissance collections but were opened as Ethnographic Collections in 1868 and 1876. In Paris, Jomard developed plans for an ethnographic museum in 1839, realized as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1878. What does this say about ethnography as a field originating in the eighteenth century and becoming institutionalized during the nineteenth century? Other collections are connected to a university: in Germany in Göttingen (1773/1928), Freiburg (1860-65) and Marburg (1925); in Oslo (1850-57); in Oxford (1883); in the USA in Cambridge (1866), Philadelphia (1889) and Berkeley (1901). How were such ethnographic collections defined and what criteria were used to distinguish them from other collections, including archaeological, natural history, anthropological, folklore or art objects? If ethnography's scope remained comprehensive during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when and how did ethnographic museums become reoriented towards only holding extra-European objects? And what led directors and policy makers to rename them world museums in the early 2000s?