The Museum Volkenkunde is an ethnographic museum in the Netherlands located in the city of Leiden.

As the first ethnographic museum in Europe, from the beginning it has included four basic principles: collection, scientific research, presentation to the public and educational orientation.

After the first efforts of this organization, the gift of around 5,000 objects became the heart of the new museum's heritage including the smaller collections of Jan Cock Blomhoff in 1826 and Johannes Gerhard Frederik van Overmeer Fischer in 1832.

The collection of the Volkenkunde Museum today contains a large number of objects from Africa, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Latin America, North America, Oceania and Asia . In developing the collection , the museum has devoted considerable attention to the acquisition of material that illustrates the historical development of world cultures; but the genesis of the museum's heritage began with the material collected in the years when Japan was officially closed with the exception of a small island in the port of Nagasaki: Dejima.

Today the museum houses its three main collections: the Blomhoff collection, the Fischer collection and the Siebold collection.