In his analysis of the most significant texts written by staff members of the Carniolan Provincial Museum the author attempts to establish the conceptual and institutional position of ethnology in this museum in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Comparing the development in other Slovene and European museum, he tries to accurately define the nature of the Carniolan Provincial Museum’s “negative traditions”, which the Ethnographic Museum inherited when it became an independent institution in 1923.