A Century of the Ethnographic Collection

The Ethnographic Collection is celebrating an anniversary!
We warmly invite you to the opening event “100 Years of the Ethnographic Collection – [-4] History, Entanglements, and the Present of a University Collection” on 13 November 2025, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m., in Room 001 at the Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas, Pilgrimstein 16.

The [-4] in the title reflects the fact that this is a four-year anniversary. Although the official decision to establish a collection was made in 1925, it was not until four years later, in 1929, that the first objects were sent to Marburg from Berlin as loans, thus laying the foundation for the collection. Next year, we will therefore celebrate the [-3].

The Ethnographic Collection is part of the field of Social and Cultural Anthropology. As a teaching collection, it serves to train students in museum work. Through seminars and independent projects, students are introduced to working with ethnographic objects.

The majority of the Ethnographic Collection is housed in a storage facility on Rudolf-Bultmann-Straße. A display room located there offers insights into the diversity of the collection and presents some of its highlights. In addition, temporary exhibitions and photographic exhibitions are held in the building of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (Deutschhausstraße), many of which are developed with student participation.

A current focus of the Ethnographic Collection is research into the provenance of African objects. This work is conducted in cooperation with the Oberhessisches Museum in Giessen and is funded by the German Lost Art Foundation as part of the project “Provenienzen von ethnographischen Objekten aus kolonialen Kontexten in Mittelhessen" ("Provenances of Ethnographic Objects from Colonial Contexts in Central Hesse.”) Further information can be found under the current research projects.