Omani handicrafts and textiles form Oman’s heritage. Their complex designs and employment of local materials provided such craft goods with the heritage element that extended across the centuries. They were woven into everyday, ordinary life so deeply that it pervaded ritualistic use. But economic liberalization and globalization impacts have been providing tough time to traditional handicraft, thereby leading to limited practice and demonstration. Therefore, at the national level, attempts are being made to preserve and introduce such an art to the next generation.
Omani textile: handicraft are also very much attached to their connection with regional tradition and mythology. National symbols of national patrimony of traditional character are items like the khanjar, a highly silvers-covered ceremonial bent dagger of masterwork craftsmanship. Handloomed items like the tisht also testify to culture perfection of use and artistry of craft that require certain geographic loci and social stratifications and give a glimpse into the country’s cultural interior abundance.
The measures to protect such customs have increasingly come to depend on character-based inter-generational transmission of practice. Towns are utilizing schools and workshops in order to convey traditional practice to artisans’ successive generations. They not only pass on the art but also continuity and identity of community.
Tourism has been one of the most powerful forces to undo this process. Tourists who seek to acquire true values of the culture, they also happen to be customers of Omani products where they are made. Artisans are reaping through being engaged in local markets, fiestas, and activities where they can exhibit steps and meanings of the culture’s values of the products. This sort of trade has the general result of gaining consumer respect and has the impact of purchasing locally produced, not mass, products.
Sustainability has also brought about industry rejuvenation. Increasingly, artists are now creating through sustainable methods like natural dyeing, organic utilization of the material, and environmentally friendly production of the traditional technique. Joining with modern designers has also brought in modern contemporariness without diluting on care for traditional technique, positioning Omani products on mass market trend and consciousness-driven consumption.
It is popular support which has been successful in making these culture industries economically sustainable. Schemes—ranging from school of vocations’ formation, cooperative artisans and support financing schemes—have been established as a structural support. The schemes are designed to professionalize the craft industry, augment livelihood, and augment cultural entrepreneurship at the grassroot level.
Renewal of Oman handicraft and textile sectors is a national movement of wide sweep whose goal is to develop and maintain culture. By the convergence of institution patronage, grass-root movement, and ecologism, the country is developing traditional arts blend with modern scenario. Omani crafts are hence re-fashioned, not only conserved, into next generation need—to place it within national heritage as well as within world artisan space.
