Uncontainable Collections
Ciraj Rassool
As a leading historian on the heritage of the ethnographic and natural history museums of South Africa, Ciraj Rassool spoke to the dehumanizing anthropologic collecting of human remains begun in the early 1900s by Austrian Rudolph Pöch, and the restitution and repatriation efforts that have and continue to counter these violent histories.
Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and directs the Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Supranational Forum, which supports research and scholarships in museum and heritage studies, exhibition production, and forensic history. He has directed the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at UWC since 2003. He is also one of the principal investigators of Action for African Cultural Restitution (AARC), which works on matters of museums and restitution.
The Uncontainable Collections Research Project is funded in part through the support of the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Program, a program of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation and administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation.
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