Special Section Introduction

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing attention being paid to the “heritage” of the Gulf states, whether by local populations, academic and other commentators, or governments. Some of this has appeared to be part of a societal (and associated governmental) reaction to the pace of socio-cultural and economic change; some of it driven by bottom-up and/or top-down imperatives of nation-building and the attendant preservation, reframing or re-inventing, and reconstructing elements of real or ostensible heritage to that end; some of it came in the form of external interest, including of the journalistic and scholarly variety. Museums, schooling, locally-based research, cultural programming, government infrastructure and urbanization projects, and political strategies have all formed part of this multi-faceted set of phenomena; but so have popular initiatives and forms of behavior both reactive and pro-active. Some aspects of these developments have been translated into the sort and extent of highprofile projects and initiatives –– in an expanding mix of home-grown and imported activity –– that justifies talking about a “heritage boom” both in quantity and intensity –– whether measured by investment or by national and international reach. The narratives about heritage and the multiplying activity surrounding it in the Gulf have begun to attract academic attention especially in regard to the growth of museums across the region, with their obviously multiple aims. But there seemed to remain a good deal of space for, and value in, inviting fresh views on the wider phenomenon of this “heritage boom”, and heritage more generally, interrogating aspects that have arguably remained under-researched and/or using empirical cases to illuminate the theme in novel ways. To that end, the University of Exeter’s Center for Gulf Studies and Georgetown University in Qatar jointly convened a conference in 2014 on “The Heritage Boom in the Gulf: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. As convenors of the conference, among the things that struck us was not only the innovative work that was being undertaken on the subject in the Gulf and around the world, but also the mutual intellectual conversations much of this work drew on and in turn further elicited, both then and since. While some of the resulting work has since been published elsewhere, three of the papers presented, byMatthewMacLean, Martin Ledstrup and Thomas Fibiger, were subsequently developed into three of the articles that follow. The conversation also subsequently drew in a fourth scholar, Trinidad Rico, into the final version of this special section.