Feel like an ethnographer! For the first time in the history of Polish museology, each visitor can enter the catalogued world of the museum's collection storehouse, normally invisible and hidden behind the scenes. "The Order of Things" shows how many treasures the museum's facilities hide and in what a clever system they are organised. In huge numbers, but in...
In great numbers but in perfect order, tools related to farm work, livestock, gathering, fishing, beekeeping and handicrafts and crafts are stored here. The oldest artefacts date from the mid-19th century, while the youngest objects are handicrafts or self-made tools from the 1970s.
The warehouse has stepped into the modern age and is now also making use of new technologies. Digital frames show archival video recordings documenting the work of the warehouses, and a multimedia kiosk shows photographs of the objects, articles and photos about them.
The centrepiece is the workbench, where you can search for each object in the exhibition in the electronic inventory of the collection and read its card in the scientific catalogue. The other ins and outs of the ethnographer's work - questionnaires, field notes, studies and photographs of research - will also see the light of day.
The authoritative classification of museum objects belongs to Piotr Szacki, an outstanding museologist and employee of the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw from 1962 to 2004.