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Accepted Paper:
Reincarnation of dolls
Alisha Saikia
(University of Vienna)
Dolls have been an integral part of history, intricately woven into the cultural fabric of the society. The scope and use of dolls in is not limited merely to a children’s plaything, a wide variety of dolls are also collected by adult doll collectors. The category of dolls collected by adult collectors that will be explored in this paper are Ball Jointed Dolls (BJD) and Blythe Dolls .Most adult doll collectors explore spaces of healing, meditation and spirituality through doll play, the construction of subjective myths and also through the creation of dolls which are generally referred to as artist dolls .
These dolls become intricate part of an adult doll collectors life adding purpose to their lives. However, the BJDs are made of resin that decolorizes with age and the Blythe dolls go through a a series of change and transformation while they are customized by an artist. What happens to the dolls that ages and decolorizes? When a doll is customized and given a new form and body, what happens to the older one? Are they dead or reincarnated? This paper explores such questions with an extensive ethnographic research methodology focussing on the relationship between adult doll collecting and neo-animism.