Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates materiality and imaginative quality of toys as magic objects. Based on ethnographic research of physics culture, it traces the pathways of rubber ducks out of their bathtub habitat, into the outskirts of science fiction universes and the heartlands of science at CERN.

Paper long abstract:

Following Wittgenstein, to see means to "see as" (Wittgenstein 1953, Guthrie 1993). And children in secular societies imagine inanimate materialities often alive. Infants charge play things with meaning and omnipotent features, animating (Ingold 2007) exchangeable ordinary objects. Their toys can be magically charged with "voodoo powers", influencing environments through contact or contagion (Frazer 1890). The desire to control an elusive world (Nader 1996), materializes in the projected imagination of magic qualities onto mundane things (Lemonnier 1992).

The paper is dedicated to the ethnographic enquiry of this phenomenon, extending it into the realm of adults. It is taking the example of a very common toy for old and young, the rubber duck. The yellow fellow has left its usual habitat - the modernist family bathtub - setting off for a long journey. It has even reached the outskirts of science fiction in the restaurant at the end of the universe in Adams' "Hitchhiker to the Galaxy". It has served as an epistemic thing in the experiments of maritime biologists and found its permanent residency in several laboratories of technoscientific provenience, such as the control room of the ATLAS experiment at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN; outliving generations of humans, guarding the acquisition of data.

Based on interviews about and participant observation of rubber ducks, I investigate how play things (time)travel back and forth between childhood and adulthood, regularly passing the borders between magic and reason, science and fiction, transgressing race, class and gender all at once.