It is responsible for research, safeguarding and management of more than 40.000 objects from Africa, Asia and South America, as well as of a separate collection of Portuguese folk art and other forms of the country's ethnographic heritage.

There is the collection assembled for the earlier Museu de Etnologia do Ultramar (Overseas Ethnology Museum), started in 1965 by Jorge Dias and his team, who introduced the field of social anthropology to Portugal.

This collection was largely assembled in the 1930s and early 1940s for exhibitions promoted by the military dictatorship (1926-1933) and the regime of the Estado Novo (1933-1974).

[7] In 2025, the permanent exhibition, titled The Museum, many Things, features objects and their cultural background from Portugal, Indonesia, Angola and Mali.

These include Jorge Dias, Margot Dias, Fernando Galhano, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira and Benjamim Pereira, who were part of a group of researchers in the Centre for Ethnological Studies from the late 1940s onwards.