Mission Statement

MISSION STATEMENT

As one of the earliest ethnographic museums in Europe, the Museum of Ethnography has been collecting, archiving, preserving, researching, and transmitting the traditional and modern cultural artefacts of Hungarian, European, and world communities since 1872. The museum is a collection of objects, images, textual material, audio recordings, and thoughts that serves as a rich and multi-faceted resource for learning about the world.

As a social history museum, the Museum of Ethnography is a place to reflect on, study, and exhibit the manifestations of material culture past and present, as well as of various social phenomena. It is also the determining Hungarian institution in - and primary museological laboratory for - the fields of ethnography, European ethnology, and cultural anthropology. Given its excellent collections and the amassed knowledge it represents, the museum may be viewed as a point of departure for both other sciences, and the arts, in comprehending, accepting, and respecting cultural memory, cultural diversity, and changing identities. The concordance of knowledge and experience creates an opportunity to give expression to community and individual interpretations and relationships.

The Museum of Ethnography is an open cultural space, where past and present converge, where science and the transmission of knowledge conjoin, and where cultures and generations come to meet and converse.