Doha’s cultural armature on display: a response to Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums put the Nation and the World on Display

ABSTRACT

After a brief discussion of the rapidly changing international museum world in Doha, this response piece engages with Peggy Levitt’s arguments around cultural armature and the role of museums in managing a city’s diversity, focusing on Doha, Qatar. Given the dominant migrant foreign population (88 per cent) and the careful protection of national citizenship in Qatar, the role of museums in managing diversity presents a situation that contrasts with older nation states: rather than encouraging inclusion, the museums in Qatar and the Arabian Peninsula states play a role in constructing and protecting a pure concept of national identity on behalf of a minority citizen population that deliberately fails to embrace any notion of diversity. This piece uses brief case studies to illustrate this process of exclusion, expanding Levitt’s original argument.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural armature
• Doha
• diversity
• national identity
• exclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.