The purpose of this academic dissertation is to investigate how ethnographic museums as
organizations and reflections of the museum institution adapt to changing societal and cultural
environments. The museum institution is a larger concept than just one single museum.
It is one of the ways modern societies arrange their idea of past and present. The aim
in this research is to follow the development of three museum cases in Finland, Hungary
and Greece. I have chosen museums which have folk-life as their topic and are created by
ethnologists (kansatieteilijä – néprajzkutató – laografos). In addition to this, I found it important
to study museums which are situated on the semi-periphery. It means that the museums
are not in the centre – neither in the centre of the European museum world, nor in
the center of their own countries. The museums I selected are Kuralan Kylämäki Village of
Living History in Turku, Finland, the Open-air Ethnographic Collection of the Ópusztaszer
Historical-Memorial Park in southeastern Hungary, and the museum of the Peloponnesian
Folklore Foundation in Nafplion, Greece. All of these museums have their starting
point in the 1970s and I follow their development until the beginning of the 2000s.