Addressing Dolls as Objects of Study in Material Culture
Ellen M. Tsagaris
ellentsagaris@gmail.com
According to Australianmuseum.net,
a “cultural object is an object made by humans for a practical and/or spiritual
purpose.” Certainly dolls qualify as
cultural objects by this definition; when created for play or retail
merchandise, they serve a practical purpose.
As Max
Von Boehn, Carl
Fox, Janet
Pagter Johl, Emily
Jackson, Laura
Starr and others have documented, the doll began as a religious figure or
idol, meant to serve spiritual purposes.
The Study of Material culture studies cultural objects and
culture in general. Antiques in particular are important, and my alma mater, Augustana College, has created
a new major in this area, closely related to art history.
Material
culture studies analyze how we interact with objects, and how they are used
or traded, curated or thrown away. We,
as humans, have treasured and collected certain objects since The Stone Age,
and even animals like chimps and orangutans have exhibited human like behaviors
involving collecting objects and tool use.
In fact, other animals also tend to collect or save certain types of
things.
My observations indicate that this is a course of study
related to archaeology, anthropology, sociology, historiography, and art
history. A study of dolls is right at
home in such an academic canon. One student at a local college has focused on
the study of antiques, and uses her grandmother’s antiques business as a
research source.
By its very definition, doll collecting involves scholarship of a serious nature. More and more serious research is being done
on dolls and their history. The question
might become, why have dolls been ignored by Academe for so long? According to Elizabeth
V. Sweet whose book “Dolls” is a partial bibliography of doll study, “. . .
the marginalized status of children and the taken for granted nature of
material culture have contributed to the underrepresentation of toys in
academic scholarship.” Kenneth Gross’s books On Dolls and On Puppets are
excellent sources for how dolls are important as cultural objects.
Sweet also agrees that the diverse work on dolls emerges
from a variety of fields of study including history, psychology, sociology,
communications, media studies, human development,, cultural studies, folklore studies
and more.
As Sweet writes, many different types of researchers are
interested in dolls because doll play helps children with socialization and
because dolls allow kids to “interpret cultural messages, create social
meaning, and actively carve out spaces of resistance to adult culture. Books included in her bibliography are
Manfred Bachmann’s “Dolls the wide World Over” and G. Stanley Hall’s, “A Study
of Dolls.” I would like to humbly submit
two of my books, “With Love from Tin Lizzie:
a History of Metal Dolls” and “A Bibliography of Doll and Toy Sources”,
simply because they reflect my own interest in dolls as historical and cultural
objects.
Susan Pearce address dolls and collecting objects in general
in her well written and documented four part series, The Collector’s Voice. The
series of four books examines collecting behavior from ancient to contemporary
times.
Doll collectors also collect, and even create dolls, to preserve
cultural heritage, another focus of Material
Culture studies. Cornhusk dolls, handkerchief dolls,
apple head dolls, and
other folk dolls are
collected and made to preserve the cultural heritage of early American
colonists and pioneers. Poets are not
immune to dolls, either; American Poet Dave Etter
wrote a poem called “Cornhusk Dolls”, while William
Butler Yeats and Sylvia Plath have
included poems about dolls and mannikins in their work. Tom
Whalen wrote a book of poems called “Dolls”, and your humble guide is about
to publish her book of poems about dolls called “Creepy
A** Humans: the Dolls Reply.” My late cousin Panos
Panoyoutounis who was a renowned poet in Europe
declared in his poem, “What
is Poesy?” that his little girl’s doll, and her dress, were both
“poetry.” Native American dolls are
collected and made for similar reasons, especially Kachinas
and the Pueblo
storytellers. The
Smithsonian Institution has an excellent booklet on Native American dolls
that is fee to download for anyone interested.
Ethnic doll collections also are collect to preserve other cultures as
collections in Shankar’s
International Doll
Museum , The Indianapolis Children’s
Museum, The
British Museum, and The
Yokohama Doll Museum show.
Didn’t we all know dolls were important? I have a male friend who is a retired
detective who collects dolls because he is a history buff, and he considers
dolls to be historical objects. Doll
artist and author R. Lane Herron stresses in his many books that dolls are
indeed historical and art objects, too.
