Janina Tuwanówna’s museology

Abstract

The article is an elaboration of the museum legacy and the biography of a largely unknown ethnographer and museologist Janina Tuwan (1905–1959), asociated during the period 1926–1939 with the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, operating under the Museum of Industry and Agriculture. She held a PhD in humanities, was a president of the pre-war Warsaw Women Rowers’ Club, member of the Polish Committee of the International Federation of University Women, activist of the Women’s Military Training, supporting member of the Polish Underground Movement Study, a soldier of the Home Army, a liaison officer in the Warsaw Uprising with the rank of captain under the nom de guerre ‘Ina’. Her life and achievements in the field of ethnological and museological sciences have been discussed mainly on the basis of archival materials belonging to two sets of legacies stored in the Archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum and in the special collections of the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw. In the light of the extant materials, Janina Tuwan appears to have been a committed museologist, who devoted most of her life, both in pre-war Poland and while living in exile in France after the war, to her passion – museology. Her scholarly works and articles preserved in her legacies briefly shed light on the topics she dealt with, which concerned the way of organization, arrangement and exhibition in ethnographic museums in the 1940s and 1950s.