In order to access sites of cultural production and national celebrations for conducting research on the nation as discourse in Qatar, several techniques of qualitative inquiry were employed. The first of them was conducting archival research in the electronic archives that the government of Qatar itself has created in order to disseminate information regarding activities during national celebrations, temporary and permanent exhibitions in the museums and audio-visual and printed material related to those sites. Since these archives host physical material about imaginings of the nation, conducting this kind of research was the first way to collect information. By so doing, a number of documents came out that informed the reflection on national identity in contemporary Qatar.
For the museums and archaeological sites, archival research in the website and You Tube channel of Qatar Museums was one of the most recurrent forms of inquiry in this research. Qatar Museums is the main government body in charge of eight museums,8 including the forthcoming National Museum of Qatar, and several archaeological sites, including the Al-Zubarah fort, which became the first UNESCO heritage site in Qatar in 2013. Since the four exhibition houses of the recently-inaugurated Doha’s downtown project of Msheireb properties is one of those sites displaying the discourse on the nation, the website of Msheireb properties was part of this research too. Similarly, the website and the You Tube channel of Qatar’s National Day that includes videos related the yearly celebrations since 2010, was the main source to access the national celebrations. These two sites provided this research with printed and audio-visual material regarding the national celebrations. Taken together, these different sources comprised the electronic archive informing this research.
This research employed participant observation as a second form of inquiry, which included visits to most of the aforementioned sites during the four months of fieldwork in Doha, Qatar. Since
8 The museums administered by Qatar Museums are the following: Museum of Islamic Art, Mathaf: Arab Museum
of Modern Art, Garage Gallery: Fire Station, QM Gallery Alriwaq, QM Gallery Katara, National Museum of Qatar, Orientalist Museum and 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum.
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some of them were not open to the public and some others were still under construction by the time fieldwork took place, it was impossible to visit all of the sites selected for research. Similarly, due to time constraints it was impossible to attend all the events on occasion of the national day. These events took place during the 2015 celebrations, and the data collected through participant observation was complementary of that collected through electronic archival research.
For the purposes of this research, conducting participant observation meant visiting some of the sites informing this research, taking notes and photographs during those visits, and collecting documents related to those sites, such as booklets and brochures. These visits included museums and archaeological sites administered by Qatar Museums and the exhibition houses of Msheireb properties in Doha’s downtown. These activities also took place in the celebrations on the National Day, which provided an additional way of collecting data in those sites. Participant observation was thus an additional technique of research that allowed to collect critical information for informing this study about the way the nation is imagined in contemporary Qatar.
Finally, the third research technique used to access those sites was semi-structured interviews with journalists, government officials and academics. The purpose of these interviews, which took place during fieldwork in Doha, was to gain a broader understanding of the reinvigoration of the nationalist discourse in Qatar over the last years, and to have access to different perspectives on the imaginings of the nation within those initiatives. For attaining this purpose, interviewing academics from universities and research centres based in Qatar and journalists from local media outlets was especially important. Furthermore, since some of the sites that are relevant for this research are either not open to the public or still under construction, interviewing people involved in those projects was the only way to access those sites. Overall, these interviews provided data which complemented that collected through archival research and participant observation.
Before explaining how data was collected and analysed through the aforementioned research techniques, it is noteworthy to reflect upon questions of language. In this regard, as the appendix
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shows, the language of the material used for this thesis is English and Arabic. While most of the material is comprised by English sources, some Arabic source were also included, such as the booklet “Mosques in Qatar: their history and their buildings” (Masajid Qatar: Tarikhuha wa-‘Amaratuha), the video on occasion of Qatar’s family day (Tawa’wi bi-Munasibah Yaum al-Usrah fi-Qatar), the animated film “The Hero and the Message” (Waza’iqi: Batal wa-Risalah-Kartoon). The main selection criteria for the sources was availability, as it was English the most recurred language in the sources available. Moreover, while some sources were also included in Arabic, they were simple and unaltered translations of the English versions. Given English sources would be more easy to analyse and manage, it was the English version, rather than the Arabic one, which were included in this research.
Furthermore, while it is recognized Arabic sources might slightly differ from English sources, it might be risky, without a proper research, to make a cutting distinction between Arabic and English discourses, and to construct two separate domains of the nation depending on the language used. Since exploring the possibility of having two different discourses by comparing how the Qatari nation is represented in Arabic and English sources would be a different project, this thesis does not address that question. Thus, the main objective here is to discuss whether national identity, as it is attributed with meaning in heritage and cultural sites, is somehow related with the assemblage of neoliberal frameworks of governance in the specific case of Qatar. In other words, does national identity plays any role in this context of economic and political reform, regardless of the differences between Arabic and English sources. The material in which this thesis draws is useful for attaining that purpose because it shows the recurrence of certain tropes that appear intertextuality regardless of the language of each source.
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