Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich

About this place

A scientific museum of social anthropology belonging to the University of Zurich, opened in **1889** and the third-oldest ethnographic museum in Switzerland; its holdings grew out of the collection of the Ethnographic Society founded in the city a year earlier. It keeps some **forty thousand objects** from across the continents, along with about forty thousand historical photographs and a film archive. What sets it apart is that it does not display "peoples" the way nineteenth-century museums did: it works openly on questions of **where the objects came from and their colonial context**, in collaboration with descendants of the communities they came from, and its exhibitions are temporary and focused on a single theme rather than encyclopaedic. A small, quiet museum you can read in an hour, not a march through endless halls. Half the pleasure is the setting: the building stands inside the **Old Botanical Garden**, originally the "zur Katz" artillery bastion of Zurich's baroque fortifications; it was dismantled in 1837 and a university botanical garden laid out in its place, and once the garden moved to its new site the ground became a public park, from 1976. At its centre is the octagonal **palm house** of cast iron (1877, replacing a wooden one of 1851), used now for concerts and exhibitions. Museum and park are both free, and both are minutes from the Bahnhofstrasse.