Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them

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 strike a chord in the hearts of middle-aged and older women, their core buyers, some of whom create "nurseries" devoted to collections that number in the hundreds.

Each doll has its own name, identity and "adoption certificate," like Shawna, "who has just learned to stack blocks all by herself," and Bobby, whose "brown, handset eyes shine with mischief and little-boy plans." Exploring the nexus of emotions, consumption and commodification they represent, A. F. Robertson tracks the rise of the porcelain collectible market; interviews the women themselves; and visits their clubs, fairs and homes to understand what makes the dolls so irresistible.

Lifelike but freakish; novelties that profess to be antiques; pricey kitsch: These dolls are the product of powerful emotions and big business. Life Like Dolls pursues why middle-class, educated women obsessively collect these dolls and what this phenomenon says about our culture. Read more Continue reading Read less REVIEW
"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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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. Read more Continue reading Read less