The policy of Polish authorities after 1945 on museum collections. The example of non-European collection of the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw

Abstract

The National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw built its collection twice. The first stage started in 1888, the date of the Museum's founding and lasted until the outbreak of World War II. Over the 40 years of its existence, the Museum collected about 30,000 objects. With the outbreak of the  war and as a result of the destruction caused by the occupier, both the Museum building and all its contents - collections of Polish, European and non-European ethnography, pre-war inventories, catalogues, archives and iconographic collections - were destroyed, dispersed or lost.

After the end of World War II, the museum community throughout the country, including the employees of the newly established Muzeum Kultur Ludowych (The Museum of Folk Cultures) quickly began  to rebuild the network of museums and their collections. For the Museum, this was the second period of building the collection from scratch, this time in the new reality of People's Republic of Poland, when the state policy in the field of museology was based on the so-called “planned action”. Its aim was not only to regulate the network of museums in the voivodeships, but also to have all museum collections in the whole country at their disposal. The operation of merging, re-locating and centralizing collections, so clearly illustrated on the example of the Museum of Folk Cultures, reflected a political idea about the ethnographic museology in Poland during the Stalinist period.