Dolls as Lessons in Material Culture; Beyond Friday the 13th

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.