Museums - Musée d'Ethnographie de Bordeaux 2

Created in 1894 as the Musée de Pathologie Exotique et d’Etudes Coloniales (Museum of Exotic Pathology and Colonial Studies), this museum was open from 1901 to 1914, but did not resume activity until 1977. Its collections are primarily Asian, West African, Arctic, and Pacific. They illustrate important aspects of social and cultural life with an array of objects relating to clothing, food, music, transportation, tobacco, opium, and warfare. The bulk of the museum’s holdings come from important donations from alumni of the Ecole Principale de la Santé de la Marine (Navy Medical School), who were stationed in the colonies. There are 481 African objects, 274 from the Arctic (including two fascinating west Siberian Khante masks), about twenty Japanese Ainu pieces, and a variety of artifacts from Asia, Oceania and the Americas that have not yet been inventoried.