Ayesha Maria Mualla

AYESHA MUALLA, then a graduate student at Shiv Nadar University, Noida, India, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “The Study of the Social Life of Frankincense in Oman,” supervised by Dr Yasmeen Arif. This study draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2024 and June 2025 in Nizwa, Muscat, and Salalah to examine the social, economic, and political life of frankincense (luban) in Oman. By following frankincense across diverse landscapes and institutions, the research highlights how this material shapes and is shaped by regional histories, ecologies, and contemporary labor practices.The research focuses not only on material objects but also on the processes through which they are made. By examining the months-long harvesting process conducted during the summer, the fieldwork encounters foreground the labor-intensive process of making frankincense. Labor that sustains the trade is increasingly marked invisible, and the harvest is shaped by occluded stories of migrant labor practices. The ethnography in Al Haffa Souq further highlights how frankincense trade continues to shape and define communities and social life through kinship networks and collective memory. Fieldwork in state-led initiatives, including Wadi Dawkah and intellectual property workshops, reveals how frankincense is incorporated into heritage and legal frameworks, as well as into environmental governance through conservation projects. By examining the movements of entrepreneurs and state officials illuminates a transnational political economy, embedded in the material exchanges of a very cosmopolitan Indian Ocean trade.