The Mucem is pursuing its policy of survey collections to foster a better understanding of the world in which we live today. In this way, it is running a number of ethnographic survey programmes in Europe and the Mediterranean, sometimes in partnership with French, regional and international research institutions. 

These surveys include the collection of contemporary heritage items, compiling and documenting series of tangible and intangible objects that bear witness to the evolution of human society. These objects, some of which may eventually join the museum’s collections, never arrive alone, but rather with all the documentation (films, photographs, interviews and archives) that can be used to retrace their history, their production and consumer techniques, their uses and their representations.