Ritual Temporality and Kinship Recognition: Marriage Rituals in Oman as a Rite of Passage

Abstract

This anthropological field study examines marriage rituals in Omani society as an organized social rite of passage managed through a graduated ritual temporality, through which kinship structures are reproduced and the transition from singleness to marital status is regulated. The study is based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2024–2025 in the North Al Batinah Governorate, drawing on the researchers’ prolonged immersion in the local community and on oral narratives collected from women and men across different generations. These narratives provide an emic understanding of the logic of ritual practice as it is locally experienced and interpreted. The study is theoretically grounded in Arnold van Gennep’s model of rites of passage, with reference to Victor Turner’s elaborations on the liminal phase. Rather than approaching marriage rituals as a festive sequence or a chronological narration of events, the study conceptualizes them as an integrated ritual structure organized around three interrelated stages: separation, liminal suspension, and reintegration. The findings demonstrate that practices such as engagement and initial preparations perform a function of symbolic separation from the world of singleness, while the liminal phase constitutes a temporal–social space in which the previous status is suspended and kinship identity is reconfigured. Wedding rituals and subsequent practices contribute to stabilizing the new social position and to the collective re-recognition of marriage. The study further reveals that contemporary organizational and economic transformations have not led to a dismantling of the logic of passage, but rather to its re-embedding within new organizational forms, while preserving the kinship function of ritual. The study concludes that marriage rituals in Oman are governed by a ritual temporality that accomplishes kinship recognition as a necessary condition for the completion of social transition, thereby ensuring the continuity of the social order despite changing modes of practice.