People, People, People

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00:01

George Gavrilis

This episode was recorded after the Taliban took over the whole of Afghanistan. 

00:08
Laura Tedesco
The last several weeks were very wrenching with respect to watching what was happening in Afghanistan, and this desperate scramble to try to help people get out, and the day-by-day realization that very few people are getting out. I mean, no shade on the 120,000 Afghans that the U.S. managed to get out of Kabul in an airport with one runway, I'd just like to point that out. It's like a third-world airport with one bumpy runway, and they got 120,000 people out in two weeks. Just saying.

00:45
Laura Tedesco

But, among the culture kids that I work with, and who were frantically messaging me all the time, "I am terrified— I will need to get out with my family of 17." I'm so sorry. I'm trying. I'm trying, you know. So—

01:03
George Gavrilis
I don't know, Laurie, if you heard, but the government was just announced. It is 90% Pashtuns. 90%. 

01:09
Laura Tedesco

George, they put a Haqqani as the Minister of Interior. 

01:13
George Gavrilis
They're not even pretending.

01:15
Laura Tedesco

They are not even pretending.

01:17
George Gavrilis

Yeah. But this is a real problem, because this means people aren't going to be able to get out. 

01:20
Laura Tedesco
And the Minister of Culture— of course I was interested in who that is. He was released from Guantanamo— 

01:27

George Gavrilis
Oh, Jesus.

01:28
Laura Tedesco
—when they did the Bowe Bergdahl Taliban 5 exchange.

01:32

George Gavrilis
I'm actually much more interested to see who their directors and deputy directors are going to be in the ministries. And that we will not know for a while.  

01:44

George Gavrilis

In 2018, the US State Department published an unlikely work, titled Afghanistan’s Heritage: Restoring Spirit and Stone. It came in the form of a coffee table book, filled with exquisite photos of the country’s cultural traditions and built heritage. It included essays by Afghan writers on what their culture and history mean to them. It’s a book I keep close to my heart, and one that does not sit on my coffee table just gathering dust. 

02:10

George Gavrilis

The book is a counterpoint to how we started our podcast series, with that first episode about the forlorn minarets in the dusty Ghazni plain. Truth be told, we were over-romanticizing things a bit. You see, most of Afghanistan’s heritage sits smack inside bustling cities and provincial towns. Citadels rise up among markets, ramshackle neighborhoods back up on holy shrines, and children play in the magnificent grounds of Babur’s gardens in Kabul.

02:39

George Gavrilis

Come join us as we talk about Afghanistan’s lived heritage through the pages of this hugely important book, a book that matters more than ever now that so much is uncertain since the Taliban took over the country.

02:55
George Gavrilis
So today we're talking about a project that gets to the heart of cultural heritage, the work that you did, and everything that Afghanistan has to offer the world in terms of its culture and archaeology. Tell us about that.

03:08
Laura Tedesco
An idea was born in early 2016 to create a photography book of cultural sites in Afghanistan, that would be representative both of sort of the diversity of Afghanistan's heritage, but also the 40-plus cultural sites and projects that the Department of State had supported. It was to do a curated selection of these projects across Afghanistan. It was meant to memorialize progress in this work, and to capture images that were not widely known about Afghanistan's heritage.

03:53
George Gavrilis
Afghanistan's Heritage: Restoring Spirit and Stone.

03:57
Laura Tedesco
Yeah. It's not for sale. It's been given out freely. It's been published in English, Dari, and Pashto. But now, the book has even more meaning given the change in the Kabul government.

04:11

George Gavrilis
So where did the idea for the book come from? And, you are a pretty modest person. I expect you to drop that modesty now.

04:19
Laura Tedesco
I think it was my idea. Maybe I adopted it from something somebody else said. The precise genesis of the idea, I don't recall. I know I carried the idea to publication. 

04:35

George Gavrilis
I think your middle name should be "disclaimer."

04:41

George Gavrilis
Robert Nickelsberg.

04:42

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, Bob. And we've gotten to be good friends over the years. 

04:45

George Gavrilis
But you had a rocky start, you were telling me. Why was that?

04:48

Laura Tedesco
Well, I didn't know how to work with a photographer at the beginning, who had been photographing Afghanistan for 30 years. It took me a while to understand how to communicate the vision that I had for the photographs.

05:02

Laura Tedesco
I kept communicating to Bob that these monuments are very much part of a living landscape in Afghanistan. They're part of the literal lived landscape, the psychological landscape, the cultural landscape of Afghans living around them.

05:18
Laura Tedesco
I said, I don't want pictures of a monument in isolation on the landscape when you go at the crack of dawn, and nobody is there. We need to see these as they are in the middle of the day with a bustling life taking place around them. People, people, people. 

05:43

George Gavrilis
Yeah, and that's the thing. People, people, people. Every photo is filled with people. And the cover photo is this— There's no center of gravity, there's no clear single perspective. And so you have blue sky. And you have this massive Citadel in Herat rising up in the picture. And below the Citadel, you see this jumbled marketplace, with people on small vehicles and bikes and a family going by in a car,  where there are like three or four children in the car looking out of the windows at the photographer, presumably. It's a lived city, and a lived monument in the distance.

06:29

George Gavrilis

I want to flag one other photo. The first picture is of one of the huge Buddhist stupas that you talk about in previous episodes. Standing in the foreground, is this young kid dressed in a traditional brown shalwar kameez, and he's gathering dried leaves. I think that's what my son will look like when he's a few years older. 

06:53
Laura Tedesco
That picture you're referring to of the young boy, he's holding some brush or leaves that he was collecting for animals that he was shepherding nearby. That photograph was taken before any restoration work had yet started on that stupa. So that was in August or September of 2016.

07:13

Laura Tedesco
It hadn't been targeted for destruction or anything. It had been neglected and earthquakes had damaged it. It's in Parwan province, which is immediately adjacent to Kabul. And it's very close to Bagram, which was, you know, the huge airbase that the US military used until recently.

07:32

Laura Tedesco

It is now, if not the biggest as it was in its time around the fourth century AD, it is definitely one of the biggest stupas in the entire region from that Kushan era.   

07:48

Laura Tedesco

It's called Topdara, and that is the same name as the village next to this stupa, where more than 50, or 60 men from the local village were employed over the course of several years to do the restoration work.

08:02

Laura Tedesco

I was only able to visit it by helicopter. The drive wasn't safe at that time. That's just one partial story of one photo in the book. And there must be over 100 pictures in the book.

08:15

George Gavrilis

Yeah, and I realized that I called it "schtupa" instead of "stupa." 

08:18

Laura Tedesco
[laughing]

08:20

George Gavrilis
I don't know why—

08:21
Laura Tedesco

That was the Yiddish pronunciation?

08:23

George Gavrilis

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for not correcting me, but you should. Because we don't want inadvertently the two non-Buddhists listening to mispronounce this.

08:37

George Gavrilis

The book is more than the pictures in it. There are wonderful, short essays by Afghans.

08:43
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, that was really part of the larger idea to have young Afghan writers' views on what Afghan heritage is and means to them. One of the writers, he's an older Afghan, and his perspective is also very important. 

09:01

George Gavrilis
Who's the elder?

09:03

Laura Tedesco
Mr. Khaleeq. He wrote about the North— Balkh province. And he's a very learned man. And his essay was first written in Dari. But the other essayists are all young— all raised and brought up during the Taliban era in Afghanistan, so their views are particularly important.

09:25

George Gavrilis

There's also an interview in the book by Nancy Dupree, the fabled archaeologist, the last interview that she gave before she died.

09:36
Laura Tedesco
That's true. A close contact of mine, and who was a very dear friend of Nancy's, went to her home. And they had a free-flowing discussion. Nancy, you know, she never minced words. She suffered no fools.

09:50
George Gavrilis
She's like you. I see a lot of similarities in the two of you. I hope you don't mind me saying—

09:55
Laura Tedesco
I don't. That's an honor. So, she had a lot of views. And she wasn't particularly fond of what the US was doing with respect to cultural preservation. And that was fine. I wanted her perspective in the book and her unvarnished view.

10:12
George Gavrilis
She said, Afghans don't really know what their country has. And that's because there's been so much war, so much conflict, so much insecurity that they're not able to travel in their own country, even if they have the means to.

10:26

Laura Tedesco

Yeah. But also Afghan history, certainly pre-Islamic history, was not officially part of the school curriculum— the Buddhist and Hindu heritage of Afghanistan, or the Jewish heritage, et cetera. So Nancy is correct about that, as she was correct about really everything she said.

10:52

Laura Tedesco
Did you happen to meet her in any of your visits to Kabul?

10:56

George Gavrilis
No, but I once got to fund, at the Hollings Center, a grant project about Afghan cultural heritage— and it included interviews with Mr. Massoudi, the museum director, but also Nancy Dupree and— And Joanie Meharry and Shaharzad Akbar did a video interview with Nancy Dupree that still lives out there in the ether.

11:17

Laura Tedesco
Yes, I know that interview you're talking about. Nancy, by happenstance, because of her first husband, moved to Kabul as a diplomat's wife. She never left except for some periods that she went to Pakistan during the worst of the Civil War. And a very brief period, she came back to the United States. She was a legend in preserving Afghan heritage and she lived until her late 80s. She died in Kabul. She's really known as the grandmother of Afghanistan. 

11:53

George Gavrilis

I want to talk to you about what the plan is to disseminate it, especially now that the Taliban control Afghanistan, and that the audience isn't just the West, but it's the people of Afghanistan as well. How do we get the book in their hands?

12:12

Laura Tedesco
The book was made to be distributed in Afghanistan. That's why the book was made. There are copies in the United States that have been distributed to universities and libraries. A copy went to the Library of Congress, for example, other museums in the US. But the book was made for Afghans.

12:34

Laura Tedesco
We've had it sent to all the libraries in Afghanistan, to the universities, to Nancy Dupree Center at Kabul University, to NGOs— we've distributed it as much as possible. We hope to be able to distribute them again. I don't know when or if that time is going to come.

12:53

George Gavrilis
Since this book was not made to create a profit and not made to be sold— why can't we digitize the book and offer it in all its three languages online for anyone to download inside and outside Afghanistan for free?

13:09
Laura Tedesco
That is a fantastic idea. I am going to look into that on how to do it.

13:17

George Gavrilis

I'd like to point out that this book project, by the way, you did it all through the Trump administration.

13:23
Laura Tedesco
Yes.

13:24

George Gavrilis
How did you do something like this through the Trump administration without any intervention or anyone telling you, this is inconsequential?

13:33
Laura Tedesco
It was already sort of approved before Trump was elected. So, that train was already clicking along the tracks. And it's a low profile project with respect to things that were taking place in Afghanistan. So, you know, I sit at my desk and keep working until someone tells me to stop working. No one told me that, fortunately. So I was able to keep going on these cultural preservation projects.

14:00

George Gavrilis
Did you during the Trump years have a fear that one of his political appointees in the State Department might say, this cultural business, it's a waste of money, and that they would hand you your walking papers?

14:13
Laura Tedesco
I did. I did. Yes, I was actively looking for jobs at Home Depot, or my local grocery store, because I'm very organized. And I thought, you know, I could really work stocking shelves, and like, I would really be good at that. So yeah. But fortunately, that didn't happen. Although Home Depot is still my— it's now my plan B.

14:36

George Gavrilis
Huh. Still an option, uh? 

14:37
Laura Tedesco
It is!

14:41

George Gavrilis
So there's another project, and that's the artifact bus. Tell us about the artifact bus.

14:47
Laura Tedesco
George, there's no bus. I said there was a project called mobile museums. And somewhere—

14:53

George Gavrilis
Oh okay, so Okay.

14:54

Laura Tedesco
—in your head, you envisioned a bus mobile with artifacts on it.

14:58

George Gavrilis
Yeah, what else would it be?

15:59
Laura Tedesco
Okay, no. Let me explain.

15:01

George Gavrilis
Okay. Explain.

15:02
Laura Tedesco

This was also Nancy Dupree's idea. It was in this recognition that there was not this official curriculum that was teaching the diversity of Afghanistan's heritage. So the idea was, how can we bring information that's housed in the National Museum of Afghanistan to schools, where those students cannot get to the National Museum? 

15:28
Laura Tedesco
This was with the University of Chicago and the National Museum in Kabul. We decided to make 25 facsimile artifacts— 3D scans of artifacts in the collection of the National Museum that represented all different time periods and diverse cultures—

15:47

Laura Tedesco
And they're made out of polymer resin, they're painted to look like the original artifact, but there's no mistaking that it's a facsimile. And bring these artifacts to schools along with a well-conceived lesson plan tailored for high school students with a nifty video about Afghanistan's history and then all the kids get to handle the artifacts. And it becomes this tactile way of learning about Afghanistan's heritage. 

16:17

George Gavrilis
How far did the caravan of artifacts go?

16:21
Laura Tedesco
They went all over. They were out at schools in Herat, in Kandahar. We had hired two really excellent teachers to implement this project. We sent them to Bamiyan, to Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, and we sent them out to Nangarhar, in Jalala—

16:37
George Gavrilis
Nangarhar?

16:39
Laura Tedesco
—in Jalalabad.

16:40
George Gavrilis

Wow.

16:41

Laura Tedesco
Yeah. And over 15,000 high school girls and boys attended these programs over the course of about a year and a half to two years. And it just ended in June of this year, George, whenever school stopped for the mid-year break. And then, you know, the Taliban takeover, and so—

17:04
George Gavrilis
Right, just as the Taliban was roiling over the country—

17:08
Laura Tedesco
Pretty much.

17:10

George Gavrilis
Yeah.

17:11

Laura Tedesco

The program was even going to orphanages. The last few months of the project, we weren't able to go out to the provinces. We had to stick to more schools in Kabul. 

17:18

George Gavrilis
Wow. 

17:23

George Gavrilis
So now that the whole of Afghanistan is under Taliban control, and that the Taliban today, on the day we're recording, announced their government— What is the situation at the National Museum? What do we know?

17:36

Laura Tedesco
Yeah, so what I know, updated as of yesterday, is that the museum is closed and has been closed since August 16. It is being guarded by Taliban representatives, guards, police— I'm not sure what to refer to them as. The previous director of the National Museum was— this is unclear to me actually. At first, it was reported that he was invited to relinquish his position. And then I heard recently that Oh, actually, he still has the keys to the museum and what his future at the National Museum is is not clear.

18:14

George Gavrilis
This is Mr. Fahim.

18:16

Laura Tedesco
Yes. Yes. But I don't know. Do we want to name him in this?

18:22
George Gavrilis

I mean, it's public knowledge who he is. He posted on Facebook under his name, so.

18:27

Laura Tedesco
He did, and he freely gives interviews to international journalists. I just want to be mindful of protecting people's privacy.

18:33
George Gavrilis
Sure. I do wonder if the Taliban is listening to our podcast and taking notes.

18:39

Laura Tedesco
I don't know.

18:40

George Gavrilis
Yeah, we'll be careful nonetheless.

18:43

Laura Tedesco
Yeah. They're very savvy with social media, you know?

18:46
George Gavrilis
Yeah.

18:47
Laura Tedesco
Unlike you and I.

18:52

George Gavrilis
Why is it that we hate social media? My heart is just not in it. What's your feeling?

18:58

Laura Tedesco
Same. Same.

18:59

George Gavrilis
Why? Why?

19:00

Laura Tedesco
Can't stand it. I have 100 reasons why I don't like social media. It takes up a lot of time for very little payoff, in my opinion. I'm not thinking that social media is changing the world. And maybe I need to catch up. But I'm hesitating—

19:16

George Gavrilis
I'm more of an Instagram kind of guy. Because it can be pretty, can be visual, it can be a welcome retreat.

19:21
Laura Tedesco
Yes.

21:20
George Gavrilis
I find Facebook and Twitter utterly triggering and destructive. The one glimmer is that I've been able to learn a lot about what's happening in Kabul, and even in the provinces, through social media, because there are still Afghans brave enough to post and to talk about what they're living and what they're experiencing and their reality, despite the climate of fear.

19:47

George Gavrilis
And so in that respect, it's been good. And it has, at least for me, made up for the foreign press in how they covered Afghanistan the past few weeks, largely restricting themselves to the perimeter of the airport, while the rest of the country went uncovered.

20:03
Laura Tedesco
How were they supposed to get to the rest of the country?

20:07

George Gavrilis
That would be a question to ask of journalists that covered every inch of Syria during the Civil War, including places where Islamic State was.

20:17

Laura Tedesco
Okay, fair enough.

20:18
George Gavrilis
Or, to pick up the phone and to call Afghans that were willing to speak to them. I have to call out the media for the selective view that they gave us into a country that we largely owned for 20 years. Tell me that I'm wrong. Tell me that the media has done a good job.

20:33
Laura Tedesco
Well, I'm not going to tell you that. I can't speak for journalists and what they were trying to do and not trying to do. And I consume, like you, a lot of news related to there and the larger region. And I know which journalists whose reporting I will pay very close attention to, and which journalists I will not give a lot of time to reading.

21:58

Laura Tedesco
Another point I want to make is, as American news channels were being saturated with coverage on Afghanistan, I was seeing people on major networks, take your pick, talking heads and pundants who knew really very little. Suddenly everybody was an expert, when they might have actually only been to Afghanistan a couple of times, 10 years ago.

21:30
Laura Tedesco
And to me, that was, you know, I get it, the news, they got to fill their 24-hour news cycle, but there were a lot of people talking about stuff that didn't really know what they were talking about. 

21:41

George Gavrilis

Well, that's true. The information that has come out of Afghanistan has been so curated in a misinformed and selective way that we will not get stories about the museum, we will not get stories about other parts of Afghanistan, we will not get many stories that make up the entire mosaic and the entire picture of what's going on.

22:06
Laura Tedesco
On that thread that you're talking about, I want to go back to the book that we started out—

22:10

George Gavrilis
Okay.

22:11
Laura Tedesco
— talking about, for this reason.

22:13

Laura Tedesco
Often the photographs that are put out for public consumption, whether in National Geographic or news media, or even TV that covers Afghanistan, there's a criteria of what is typically in those photos. It's poor people, which is a reality. Yes. Or it's women in burkas. Also, yes, a reality. And old men with long white beards and turbans sitting around or maybe hunched over and sweeping something with a very old-fashioned, homemade brush broom, and particularly at pictures of heritage. 

22:52

Laura Tedesco
I could go on and on about that. But when we were planning for photographs for this book, I was very adamant that I wanted photographs that were capturing vitality, because that's very much an aspect of Afghan lived life. And there's several from Babur's Gardens in Kabul, which is this beautiful garden from Emperor Babur that's been restored by the Aga Khan. And it's a major kind of social gathering and resting place for Kabulis, people from Kabul, and you see children playing, and people taking selfies.

23:30
George Gavrilis

And yes, there's the most beautiful picture of these school girls in pink veils, and maroon dresses that are playing in the garden.

23:41
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, yeah. 

23:44
George Gavrilis
And like you're saying, it's lived life.

23:46
Laura Tedesco
We do a disservice to Afghanistan, when the only images that are pumped out of there are women in burkas or poor people under some sort of experience of oppression, or old men hunched over sweeping marble floors.

24:02

George Gavrilis
Yeah. But you know, the reality is that now, the situation today is that these school kids, these girls and boys that are in the book, I'm sure the vast majority are still in the country. And they are going to grow up in a very different Afghanistan.

24:18
Laura Tedesco
I don't know what the future holds. Let's see. You know, there's protests happening in Kabul the last couple of days, the women protesting in the streets. And I mean, none of us knows what's—

24:29
George Gavrilis
It's exceptional bravery.

24:30
Laura Tedesco
It is.

24:33

Laura Tedesco
One of the bigger questions at hand is, what is the future for Afghanistan's heritage, right?

24:39

George Gavrilis
Right. But heritage is not just what's in the museum and what's at Mes Aynak. Heritage is also lived culture. That's why that first essay by Qais Akbar Omar is so beautiful. Qais Akbar Omar, who talks about his beloved aunt, and all of the votive offerings, like the ties and the padlocks and little trinkets that would be left at the shrines where she and her friends and other people would pray.

25:10
George Gavrilis
And I felt such a deep connection and a familiarity, because it felt like what we do in Greece, it felt like what I saw in Turkey when I lived there, it felt like what I saw in the countryside of Ireland where people go, and they leave little ties on branches by holy wells, and they pray, and it brings people together of all religions. 

25:31
Laura Tedesco
I had never met him. I have never met him face to face. But Qais Akbar Omar had written a beautiful book that I had read. And I admired his writing. And I very much wanted him to write an essay for this book.

25:49
Laura Tedesco
I was talking to him about the vision for the book, and that I wanted him to write whatever he wanted, but only with a theme about heritage. And I said, you know, if you'd prefer to write in Dari, we'll have a translator to take care of that, or however you'd like. And he was rather soft spoken, very kind. And he said, without drama, "I prefer to write in English, because it's too painful to write in Dari."

26:17

George Gavrilis
How much anguish must that person's family have lived, for them to find it too painful to write in their native language? And to prefer to distance the pain a little bit by writing in a foreign language? 

26:32

Laura Tedesco
And our photographer Bob Nickelsberg realized that he, from the 1980s, had a picture of Qais Akbar Omar's uncle in Kabul, who was a well-known rug dealer and rug merchant, and contacted Qais Akbar Omar and said, I think this is a photo of your family. And maybe Qais' father was even in the picture. 

26:58
Laura Tedesco
Qais Akbar was so happy to have it because he said when the family left Kabul, they couldn't take any photos with them. They had no family photos left. So it was particularly touching to make this little connection. 

27:19
George Gavrilis
Yeah, and that brings up something else that I've been thinking a lot about over the past few weeks. Friends of mine in Afghanistan have spent long nights going through family photos, through precious documents, deciding whether they should destroy them, in case there is something incriminating— that if the Taliban comes and knocks on the door, will a photo or a document be cause for someone to be arrested or disappeared? And that is a terrible way to live. I can't even imagine.

27:53

George Gavrilis
People are erasing their cultural heritage, their family heritage, their personal heritage and their own legacies just for the sake of security, just to prevent a potential existential threat that comes through a knock at the door. It makes you think. I hope we all think what that means and what our responsibility is, in our short lives, to justice, and doing what's right.

28:21

Laura Tedesco
Well said, George.

28:26

George Gavrilis
So Laurie, what is one of the irritating things that you would hear in Afghanistan?

28:32

Laura Tedesco
Not just in Afghanistan, when I hear someone refer to Afghans as Afghani, like the Afghani people, it makes me grind my teeth a little bit when I hear somebody do that. And I don't want to be like, you're saying that all wrong. Sometimes I'll say it to somebody, but mostly, I'll just let it go. The Afghan people are not Afghani. That is the money. Afghans—

29:00

George Gavrilis
That is the currency.

29:02
Laura Tedesco
It is the currency. And it can be confusing because you refer to Pakistanis as Pakistanis. But in the case of Afghans, they're Afghan people, not Afghani people. And that really is a little bit of a bugaboo for me.

29:17

Laura Tedesco
It's a data point for me that someone might not know exactly what they're talking about. Even people on the news, all those experts that came out of the woodwork the last few weeks, when I've heard them refer to Afghans as Afghani, I'm like, Huh, how much of an expert are you?

29:40

Laura Tedesco
I had envisioned a geographical representation of Afghanistan's diverse heritage. And I decidedly did not want this book to be academically oriented, but a visual document of Afghan heritage. I was also guided by what projects the United States supported for heritage preservation. And it wasn't just bricks and mortar of monuments.

30:07
Laura Tedesco
It also included, you know, recording of traditional music and training of traditional crafts and calligraphy. There was a whole variety of things.

30:18

Laura Tedesco
We got Roya Sadat, this incredibly talented filmmaker. She produced a beautiful piece about her home city of Herat. I really wanted more than one Afghan woman writer and that was hard to find, not because there's a shortage of Afghan women writers. I just didn't know many. And so I was limited in my access.

30:44

Laura Tedesco
And, of course, I had Afghan colleagues who were helping me with this book— could not have happened without the help of my Afghan colleagues working alongside me in Kabul.

30:58

Laura Tedesco
It was very important to me that there was no mention of dollar amounts of money spent. I was very adamant about that.

31:10

George Gavrilis
Say why.

31:12

Laura Tedesco
Stop putting a dollar amount associated with cultural preservation. It's putting a monetary value on a nation's heritage. And the United States. We're always so keen, we spent this much money, we spent that much money. $80 billion. $70 billion. I mean, yes, it's all documented, but it's like, Can we just stop it, with talking about money all the time? Anyway, that's my rant. It's a bugaboo of mine.

31:41

Laura Tedesco
Now, we're having this conversation in September of 2021. And that documentation has an entirely new significance that we may have been documenting unwed girls with perhaps male friends at Babur's Gardens, because that was something that happened. And that's not going to happen now, at least while the Taliban are in power, for example.

32:08
Laura Tedesco
Or a young woman who's leading a tour of male students through the Kabul Museum— she's their tour guide. That whole ethos of having a young woman as a teacher for male students, that is a ethos that really developed over the last 20 years. And I would suspect that's going to change now.

32:32
Laura Tedesco
And what those writers have written meant something in 2016. And what they mean now is actually new and different. 

32:42
George Gavrilis
That's the irony that the Taliban is trying to make Afghanistan allegedly a religious society. I refuse to make cultural allowances for an aberrant interpretation of religion that does not have to be. 

32:57

Laura Tedesco
Good.  

33:01

George Gavrilis
I'm so grateful that you did this project. Thanks, Laurie.

33:06
Laura Tedesco
Thanks, friend. 

33:11

George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram, at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

33:27
George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 10: People, People, People — Afghanistan's Heritage 

Topics Covered in this Episode 

The weeks of turmoil in Afghanistan

The new Taliban government

Afghanistan's Heritage, the book

Origin of book idea

Robert Nickelsberg, and the photography

Cover photo

Topdara Stupa

Essays

Nancy Dupree

Dissemination of the book today

The Trump Administration

Mobile museums

The National Museum today

Social media

Media coverage on Afghanistan

More on photographs in the book: lived life

Qais Akbar Omar

The future of lived heritage

Afghan not Afghani

Back to the book: not just bricks and mortar monuments

Back to the book: not about money

Why the book matters today

Recorded on September 7, 2021