Europe

The Europe Collection safeguards and promotes regional, rural and urban heritage. Due to the collection as a whole (objects, images, books, archives) four centuries of popular memory can be drawn from the sources of folklore. The Lake Geneva and Alpine arc, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, as well as Danubian Europe are well represented. Folk arts, rural tools, industrial machinery, devotional objects, costumes, consumer utensils and contemporary lifestyles are all part of this heritage.

By confronting these seemingly familiar traces with the challenges of social themes, the Europe collection plays the role of aid in thinking (for a local reflection or a recourse to the universal) for the various communities of Geneva/City World who recognise themselves in it and draw inspiration from it, in order to transmit living cultures. The collection consists more than 20,000 objects and 7,000 images, not forgetting the Georges Amoudruz (1900-1975) archive collection of 13,000 ethnographic documents, 10,000 books and documentary binders.

Unlike the museums of former colonial countries, which separate non-European civilizations from European arts, the MEG brings together the testimonies of people from near and far, since as early as 1901, Eugène Pittard (1867-1962) took an interest in the inhabitants of the Alps to confront them with Albanians or Romanians.

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• The MUSINFO database exploits the collections kept in the reserves of the Museum of Ethnography.
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