Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter explains how, even though the forms heritage assumes in Oman may seem familiar, inasmuch as they are global, their significance is best understood within the parameters of a regional history. People's mundane engagements with the traces of the material past are subjected to hegemonic visual and discursive practices, even as their understandings turn fluid as they are subjected to changes in the region. Like the rest of the Arab-Persian Gulf region, the explanatory basis of pervasive heritage in Oman tends to reference the rise of a new form of polity — the nation-state, the need to create a new mode of collective consciousness by sociopolitical elites and to mitigate the uncertain effects of rapid modernization brought about by sudden oil wealth. Heritage, in such a scenario, is deemed no more than a fabricated form of history that papers over reality, one moreover that cannot be relied on for any kind of essential truth. The familiar form these public heritage institutions assume — from museums to textbooks — is taken as the work and design of Western professionals and thus purged of any genuine sense of the past.