ICH Tourism Dialogue #8 – Nationalised Heritagisation Discourse in the Arabian Gulf Region with AlAnood AlShaikh and Saad Hanif

The curation of cultural festivals within heritage sites became an ongoing phenomenon in contemporary heritage management, acting as a crucial interface between local heritage preservation and state-led tourism. This phenomenon, often characterised as a ‘staged heritage’ paradigm, is driven by the need to build a form of national identity through cultural continuity, community engagement, and sustainable economic development. These events transform static monuments or sites into ‘living experiences’ or “living heritage” spaces, merging tangible sites with intangible cultural expressions. This session interrogates the performativisation and festivalisation of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) across selected heritage sites in the Arabian Gulf region, arguing that such formats constitute not merely modes of display but state-mediated interventions that reconstruct the ontology of ‘living heritage’.

Drawing on case studies including Qasr Al-Hosn Festival (Abu Dhabi), Sikka Art Fair (Dubai), Sharjah Heritage Days in the United Arab Emirates, Muharraq Nights and Hawa Al-Manama in Bahrain, the session reflects how national frameworks curate, stage, and circulate heritage within rapidly modernising, globally oriented contexts.

The central research questions are: To what extent do festivalised heritage forms reconstitute community-based practices into legible, consumable performances aligned with national narratives? How are claims of “authenticity” negotiated between state institutions, cultural practitioners, and local communities? And how do these processes reflect divergent interpretations of the World Heritage Convention and the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage within non-Western nation-states?

Preliminary analysis suggests that while such events expand visibility and generate economic and diplomatic value, they risk standardising and temporally fixing practices that are otherwise fluid and context-dependent. The notion of ‘tradition’ becomes institutionalised, often privileging curated knowledge over vernacular epistemologies, thereby producing tensions between top-down governance and limited community engagement. The session contends that current policy and institutional approaches insufficiently account for context-specific definitions of ‘local’ living heritage. It therefore calls for a recalibration of interpretive and governance frameworks that examines situated practices, plural temporalities, and community-led heritage-making.