National museums generally function as a country’s defining statement of their cultural and national identity(Newton, 1996). In Qatar’s case, the desert rose which is a mineral formation of crystal clusters made out of sand grains has been embodied as a national symbol in the National Museum of Qatar. The architect of the museum, Jean Nouvel, sought to exemplify Qatar’s national identity by using a naturally occurring sediment. This notion of relating a specific landscape to the concept of national identity is not peculiar of its kind. According to Smith, one of the most significant parameters that shape a nation’s identity are symbols, memories, values, and traditions (Smith, 2002). In Qatar’s case, it is the desert rose that is being used as a bridge between nature and culture. Nouvel is illustrating this “contradiction” by exemplifying Qatar’s historical timelessness and its contemporary economic ascendancy to evoke sentimental feelings toward its past. However, the nature-culture binary has been a widely contested topic in environmental humanities. In my essay, I will be exploring the evocative implications of Nouvel’s claim of the desert rose as a timeless symbol of Qatari identity. In addition, I will be looking at literature from ecocritics such as William Cronon, Timothy Clark, and the “After Oil report” to explore the nature/culture binary that Nouvel has outlined in his architectural aims.
Following the trend of deconstructing the nature/culture binary in environmental humanities literature, William Cronon, an environmental historian and author of “The Trouble with Wilderness”, asserts that the concept of wilderness is not entirely man-made, but cultural perceptions alter our understanding of it (Cronon, 1995). Our modified dualistic vision of nature concedes to us to be dismissive of the experience of nature. Cronon brings forth the concept of romantic primitivism, which is an offshoot of romanticism that idealizes the concept of an uncivilized man that creating an aesthetic idealization that aspires to recreate a primitive experience. In addition, romantic interpretations of nature celebrate it in a sentimental sense and eventually morphed it into a nationalistic sentiment. This glorification of the wilderness experience positions humans as separate and against nature. We could see that Jean Nouvel’s attempt to recreate a “timeless” experience from the desert rose structure is essentially falling into the guise of romantic primitivism. By presenting the desert rose structure as a cultural symbol, he is trying to evoke reminiscent feelings of Qatari’s past. He states that “Symbolically, its architecture evokes the desert, its silent and eternal dimension..”(Nouvel, 2019). He is creating an illusion of a barren desert existing in an industrialized city with this semblance impending on the oversight of humanity in detaching nature and culture from each other. In addition, his symbolism romanticizes the idea of the desert as something inherently more cultural. As we know, romanticism has influenced the idea that communities shape their national identity through relationships with their geographical landscape(Smith, 2002). Nouvel is attempting to elicit an idea of the primitive past as represented by the desert rose, creating a spectacle out of it. Entering the National Museum of Qatar–which is shaped like a desert rose–stimulates feelings of entering the past that was once merely a desolate desert, and experiencing history through the art and archeological exhibits relating to Qatar’s culture. But upon exiting the museum, one is immediately hit with the stark reality of the industrialized city of Doha which is far removed from the desert simulation that was once experienced. This was Nouvel’s goal, he aimed to create a primitive experience to showcase the “contradiction” between its primitive past and industrialized present. His glorification of Qatar’s past has created a separation between the Qatari people and their past as though they could merely enter and exit the past. This illusion that Nouvel created has essentially domesticated the idea of a romanticized version of Qatar’s history.
Another author, Jason Moore who is the author of “The Rise of Cheap Nature” also takes issue with this culturally engineered concept of a nature/culture duality. As an eco-Marxist, he believes that we need to consider the ‘Capitolocene’ as an alternative geological epoch instead of the ‘Anthropocene’ because humanity exists in a patterned historical system and it represents the irreversible human interference starting from the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, nature and society are not two separate categories but actually are ideas that are co-constitutive. He rejects the notion of green arithmetic, which is the mode of thinking that suggests nature and society are separate entities (Moore,2016). In addition, capitalism birthed a law of value, or cheap nature, in terms of expanding the capacities of global capitalism based on the ‘cheap’ extraction of natural resources, thus devaluing nature. Building on Moore’s notion of the ‘Capitolocene’, we must ask ourselves if humanity’s capitalist behavior has had an irreversible impact on the environment, then how could Nouvel’s claims of the desert rose to have a ‘timeless’ feature hold? Declaring that a geological formation has a timeless component implies that it stands the test of time regardless of the dynamic feature of the country. The Capitolocene tells us that humanity’s relationship with nature has changed due to capitalism, meaning that nature and culture have always worked hand-in-hand because this relationship is a historical process. Essentially, the relationship that the Qatari population had with the barren desert, signified by the desert rose, is a different historical feature than that of the contemporary petro-fuelled relationship the Qatari population has with their land. Nouvel is placing nature in a separate historical process from that of culture as he calls it a “contradiction”. This obscures the relationship between the Qatari population and their land because nature and culture are seen as separate but not co-constitutive. Thus, the desert rose cannot be a timeless component of Qatar’s identity because the desert rose is presented as something that exists in a separate historical process, one that subsists in a barren desert. In addition, illustrating the desert rose as a symbol of Qatar’s national identity is a relatively new concept. During my research on the historical significance of the desert rose, I found that this notion did not exist prior to the opening of the National Museum of Qatar in 2019. This paints a different picture of Nouvel’s intentions behind using the desert rose to represent Qatar’s identity. The desert rose is being marketed as a cultural phenomenon in order to sell a romanticized idea of Qatar’s past. This contends with Moore’s idea of cheap nature since the museum is attaching a certain value to Qatar’s landscape, and ultimately devaluing it.
The “After-Oil” report defines our contemporary post-industrial as an oil society that is shaped by oil in physical and material ways (the Petrocultures Research Group, 2016). Taking into consideration the concept of the Anthropocene and our petro-fuelled society, the report theorizes that our culture is dependent on petroleum and that we cannot imagine our existence without it, hence the term petro-culture. Petromodernity either continues or ends under disastrous circumstances for human populations, highlighting the urgency of the issue and the urgent necessity to switch from fossil fuels to an alternate system. In addition, petro-culture hinders the possibility of a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels. Looking back at my earlier blog post about petro-culture, Nouvel made it clear that one of his archeological aims is to highlight Qatar’s economic prosperity as a result of the discovery of oil (Nouvel, 2019). Nouvel is essentially implying that Qatar’s modernity is exclusively correspondent to oil and gas by creating this natural past/petro-fuelled modernity dynamic, but the reality is that petro-modernity is only a specific form of modernity that is explicitly the result of our energy usage and should not encompass the entire idea behind modernity. His insistence that the true heritage of Qatar only lies in its pre-oil past hinders an attempt to imagine a future beyond fossil fuels for Qatar. The notion of an oil-dependant Qatari society actually causes a dissolution of Qatar’s culture and heritage, causing an eco-bio-cultural extinction that cannot foresee a culture without petroleum’s existence which puts the culture that is being portrayed to the Qatari public as a scarce resource that is bound to be extinct. In essence, the picture that Nouvel has painted to the public of Qatar as a hyper-industrialized country not only obscures the Qatari people from their past but also their present.
In conclusion, there is a huge responsibility put on the National Museum of Qatar to showcase Qatar’s national identity. Given the three secondary sources, I think that Nouvel’s efforts to portray the desert rose as a culture/nature duality obscures the Qatari public’s relationship with their history and present. Nouvel’s emphasis on the ‘timelessness’ of the desert rose further complicates the connection between Qatar and its natural resources, which is not timeless, because it changes according to accelerations of global capitalism. In addition, using the desert rose to invoke sentimental feelings of the past emphasizes the eviction of Qatari culture to its nature because it is being presented as a duality. The evocative implications of Nouvel’s architectural aims re-emphasize a romanticized version of Qatar’s landscape and blur the idea of a society that is co-constitutive with its nature. Nouvel’s rhetoric of the desert rose as a ‘timeless’ cultural symbol serves the interests of marketing efforts to sell a romanticized idea of Qatar’s culture and history. This case study is important to consider when discussing nature/culture binaries because it shows us that our current cultural narratives are dependent on the idea of our geographical landscape that exists in a specific historical process.
Works Cited
Root, D. (1996). : Museums and the making of “ourselves”: The role of objects in national identity . Flora E. S. Kaplan. American Anthropologist, 98(4), 921–922. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1996.98.4.02a00680
CRONON, W. I. L. L. I. A. M. (n.d.). The trouble with wilderness: Out Of The Woods, 28–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7zw9qw.8
Bridge, G. (2019). After oil by Petrocultures Research Group. Great Plains Research, 29(1), 41–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/gpr.2019.0005
Moore, Jason W., “The Rise of Cheap Nature” (2016). Sociology Faculty Scholarship. 2. https://orb.binghamton.edu/sociology_fac/2
National Museum of Qatar. Ateliers Jean Nouvel. (n.d.). Retrieved November 12, 2022, from http://www.jeannouvel.com/en/projects/musee-national-du-qatar/
Smith, A.D. 2002. “When is a nation.” In Geopolitcs
