1st Edition
Life Like Dolls The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them
By A. F. Robertson
Copyright 2004
288 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Since the 1980s there has been a growing billion dollar business producing porcelain collectible dolls. Avertised in Sunday newspapers and mailbox fliers, even Marie Osmond, an avid collector herself, is now promoting her own line of dolls on the Home Shopping Network and sales are soaring. With average price tags of $100 -- and $500 or more for a handcrafted or limited edition doll -- these dolls... Read more
Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. The Commodity 3. The Collection just Grows and Grows 4. The Doll that Needs You 5. Dollification 6. More than Real 7. Forever Young 8. Innocence and Fear Appendices Bibliography
Biography
A. F. Robertson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of seven books including Greed and Beyond the Family.
"By turns insightful, probing, provocative, and thoughtful, Life Like Dolls explores the richly metaphoric meaning of dolls and the inner lives of the people who collect them." -- Yona Zeldis McDonough, editor of The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty
"Doll-collecting, and the industry that supports it, moves from appearing to be a literal curiosity to the source of convincing insights about family, gender, and aging in contemporary life...[A]n account that is compelling, deep, and goes to the heart of general questions about humankind that anthropology has distinctively raised." -- George E. Marcus, editor of Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas
"Robertson shows how the doll serves to encapsulate everything from guilty pleasure and longing to big business and consumer commodification. A work of originality and verve." -- Harvey Molotch, author of Where Stuff Comes From
