The Sultanate of Oman shares land borders with Saudi Arabia and Yemen and is lapped by the waves of both the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Many Omanis today take pride in the nation’s historic trade links with Iran, Africa, South Asia, and even East Asia, highlighting a cosmopolitan past as a nation of sailors, merchants, and explorers. These transnational connections are also manifest in the nation’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. My research investigates how marriage networks, spanning both tribal and national borders, shape conceptions of citizenship, national identity, as well as hierarchies of belonging in modern Oman.

During my 14-month ethnographic fieldwork in Muscat, I interviewed many Omanis who take immense pride in their nation’s cosmopolitan past while maintaining a strict definition of who counts as “truly” Omani and is, therefore, worthy of admittance into their family through marriage. In this contribution, I explore how three categories of Omani nationals define what it means to be “truly” Omani through their family histories and marriage preferences: 1) Arab-Omanis whose families never left the Omani mainland and who self-identify as “pure”, 2) Zanzibari-Omanis whose families traveled to Africa but are considered to have maintained genealogical purity, and 3) Zanzibari-Omanis who are of “mixed” descent because their ancestors intermarried with non-Arabs. When referring here to Zanzibari-Omanis, I mean Omanis with documented (oral or written) connections to East Africa based on their cultural similarities – i.e. language, cuisine, clothing styles, etc. – and not those Omanis who are of “slave descent.” Furthermore, I distinguish between “truly” Omani as a contested category strategically used by nationals from various backgrounds and “pure” Omani as a self-ascribed category used by those Omanis whose families never emigrated from the mainland.

I build upon the work of anthropologists who argue that understandings of kinship underlie understandings of nations. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, anthropological theory presumed a dichotomy between kin-based polities and the politics of the nation-state. Theorists assumed that kin-based societies were structured around “primordial sentiments” that naturally connected members together while modern nation-states were organised around territory and ruled by politics and law. The notion that the sphere of kinship should be separated from the realm of nation-state politics has become one of the markers of modernity, meaning that polities organised according to kinship were often categorised as pre-modern. Anthropologists, in recent generations, have critiqued the notion of a teleological progression of kinship giving way to nation-states by highlighting how kin-relations continue to shape political organisation within modern Western nation-states. In a similar vein, they have described how “relatedness” extends beyond blood ties to include multiple ways of belonging – whether it be to a “family” or a “nation.