Taliban have wrecked museums in Ghazni, but Afghans will rebuild, again

On the 4th of August, the Taliban used trucks to commit two suicide bombings against Ghazni Police and the Afghan National Directorate of Security (Intelligence), then launched a gun attack on the sites. The death toll rose inexorably from ten, to twelve, to twenty, to thirty-one, to thirty-three; the number of wounded grew from ‘dozens‘, to 150, to 160, to 200, to 350; and many civilian properties – places of everyday life – were damaged.

Resisting institutional power: the women of St. Barnabas

Visual sociologist Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, museologist Alexandra Bounia and I have published an article on Resisting Institutional Power: the Women of St. Barnabas. All of the hard work was theirs. Any oversights are mine. Since they did do all of the hard work, I feel comfortable saying that it’s an interesting and delicate study of why and how sites of cultural practice (churches) become sites of cultural heritage (museums), and why and how community visitors and museum professionals manage and negotiate the use of such difficult places.

the Ukrainian museum of police atrocities

In the midst of the conflict, resisters and observers have gathered forensic evidence of the violence. For example, Postup Human Rights Centre (joint) coordinator Konstantin Reutski ‘picked up [Подобранное]’ shell cartridges(1), grenade rings and a car stopper near Zhovtnevogo (in Kiev). Now the resisters have created a temporary exhibition.

‘unprecedented’ damage and destruction in protests, riots in Greece, 12th February 2012

Media and crisis manager Stratos Safioleas (@stratosathens) judged last night’s destruction ‘unprecedented‘. Here, I have gathered together as many of the events as I could, listed in order of place: so far, Agrinio, Athens, Corfu, Herakleion, Patras, Thessaloniki, Trikala and Volos.

Moreover, I’ve grouped them by target as well: parliamentary/party/bureaucratic property; police property; banks; other commercial property; cultural venues; media organisations; personal private property; and other objects.

The destruction has been blamed on anarchist protesters, and on agents provocateurs; and I will try to probe this, and the destruction of cultural property, in detail in another post. But my analysis suggests that banks were the primary targets for destruction (even ahead of politicians’ offices). Still, there are many as-yet-undocumented incidents; there were at least 170 acts of destruction in Athens alone. I would be very grateful for any further information.

Update (16th February 2012): rioters ‘torched’ the entrance of the Numismatic Museum and smashed the windows of a Greek Resistance memorial. These are ugly acts of cultural violence; it is fortunate that the arsonists’ ignorance is only equalled by their incompetence.