These were in a shop in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the clothes are beautifully made, but I don’t know what they represent or why they have no faces.
By Julie Manley
Over the past few years, I’ve had the great pleasure and privilege of being able to travel from Australia to some very interesting places. Nearly everywhere I went I found dolls — unusual dolls, second-hand Barbies and terrible copies, dolls in churches dressed in exquisitely embroidered silks, and modern fashion dolls in one of the oldest cities on the Silk Road. Looking back on these wonderful times, I have been surprised and intrigued by all the different dolls I’ve encountered on the way.
I think everyone is familiar with the role that dolls play in the lives of children. Most of us remember our childhood dolls with fondness. Some of us still have those dolls as adults (like me, for example), but what I hadn’t really given much thought to before travelling was the universality of dolls. Dolls are everywhere and have greater meaning and diversity than I had realized.
These dolls are very similar to the more elaborate ones above, again with no faces, but using the colors of the Dominican Republic flag.
In 2013 my husband and I first went on a photographic tour to India. In 2016 we went to Northern Guatemala, Cuba, the Caribbean, and Mexico City on the way back to the U.S. before heading home to Australia. In 2018 we were in Northern India in Ladakh on a snow leopard tour, and later that year we did a Silk Road tour in Uzbekistan, then went on to Istanbul, Athens, Crete, the Andalusian area of Southern Spain, and Barcelona. In early 2019 we did a nature tour in Sabah, a state in northeast Borneo. These are some of the dolls I encountered on the way.
Dolls in religion
Many of the dolls I encountered in the Caribbean and Mexico were very much a reflection of religious beliefs, although not necessarily mainstream or Western religious beliefs.
A statue of the Virgin Mary in the cathedral in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. There were many statues like this in churches in the Caribbean and Mexico dressed in real robes in luxurious fabrics and with beautiful embroidery. A lot of these dressed figures are also doll-sized, like this one.
This small doll-like statue, high up on the cathedral wall in Santo Domingo, wears an exquisite robe embroidered in gold on silk. She was behind glass, so the image is not the best.
Day of the Dead dolls, such as these ones (above and below) from Cancun, Mexico, come in a huge variety of materials, colors, and ethnic dress. However, these have more to do with beliefs than ethnic identity.
Cuba celebrates The Day of the Dead. Although not exactly a doll, this was so much like the others I saw in Mexico I thought she was worth including, because in this instance there is not a lot of difference between what is a doll and what is a sculpture. They kind of overlap.
Madame Fortune Teller in Cuba has some serious headgear, as does her guardian doll. This is one of the most complex and elaborately dressed dolls I have ever seen. I can assure you, no one was going to touch her, move her, or otherwise disturb this 1950s black doll with blue glass eyes, possibly very rare in Cuba.
This tiny Mayan doll was under the pillow at our hotel in Mexico City and is a “bad dream catcher.” She is about 3 inches long and wears a tiny piece of handwoven ribbon. I only found her by accident when I moved my pillow.
Many Hindu households in India have detailed, elaborately dressed dolls representing Hindu gods in a special niche. I want to go back to India and buy more doll jewelry because it’s gorgeous, and you can buy all different sizes depending on what doll you have in mind. Whole shops are devoted to doll jewelry for Hindu household gods.
Dolls and Ethnic Identity
Everywhere I went, dolls were definitely a vehicle for ethnic identity. It didn’t seem to matter if the dolls were the most basic or even badly made, remote communities used whatever they could get to reflect their pride in their own cultures, and I totally applaud that.
Tikal is an ancient Mayan site in northern Guatemala, and it is loaded with dolls for tourists, all locally made from fabric or corn husks with dried flowers.
I noticed later that throughout Cuba, the Caribbean, and Mexico, this style of doll was everywhere. They were usually dressed in local variations of ethnic-style clothing.
I’m now not sure after five years, but I think it was mentioned these could be used as little sacrifice dolls in Tikal. Needless to say, I wasn’t interested in doing that.
I thought this corn doll from Tikal was particularly beautiful, but I couldn’t bring organic material back to Australia, so I gave her to a friend in the USA.
One of the most common dolls I encountered in Cuba was Loulou/Marylou, a reversible cloth doll which is ethnically Caucasian at one end and African on the other. I don’t know why these dolls were sort of standardized, from what I could see, from Old Havana on the north coast of the island to the East Cuban city of Trinidad de Cuba.
Loulou/Marylou dolls in Trinidad de Cuba, a city on the other side of the island from Old Havana.
These wooden figures seemed to be a standard way to represent Black Cubans, many of whom are musicians.
Black Cubans tended to be represented differently, apart from the Loulou/Marylou dolls.
This shop was an exception to what we saw in Cuba, stocked with elaborately dressed 1950s plastic dolls I recognized from my childhood. This one has a complicated plaited hairstyle in a wig and fancy dress.
Cancun had hundreds of these Barbies in all different kinds of Mexican dress, but whoever makes them was very careful to use Mexican-looking Barbies.
A souvenir doll at the Cancun airport. A lot of these cloth dolls had sad expressions on their faces.
This little girl with the one eyebrow and flowers in her hair is, of course, Frida Kahlo. We visited the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. She owned a beautiful little cabinet of miniature furniture and dolls, but they don’t photograph well through glass.
After Cuba and the Caribbean, we visited the U.S. Southwest. This little museum had various dolls representing all the different people who had made America their home — I wish I had noted the name of the museum. It was somewhere near the Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California.
Korean dolls in the same California museum.
In the Eastern Hemisphere
A strange assortment of dolls in the old quarter of Istanbul, Turkey (2018). I think the one on the left is in male dress, then two females, but I’m not sure. There were also some dolls that looked like Barbies in hideous tulle concoctions, but I did not photograph them.
Just to set the scene, Leh is the capital of Ladakh, a state in the Himalayas of Northern India on the border with Pakistan. It is a garrison town, with an obvious presence of the Indian army. That means when you arrive and leave you will be searched three or four times by the army — the women by a female army officer, the men separately. Not a big city, Leh is an ancient Buddhist town with stunning Buddhist monasteries and quite a few mosques.
Imagine my surprise at finding these two in a shop on the main street of Leh. The dolls are pretty basic and appear to be really bad copies of Barbie, but the clothes are gorgeous, surprisingly well-made, removable, and lined. There is just the small problem of pins — so not for kids (or hand luggage). The box was also lovely, but unfortunately, I could not bring the box home, because I had another one as well. I salvaged what I could stuff into one suitcase.
In Sabah, Borneo, we saw this set of dolls in Rungus ethnic costume called Humee & Akee. The text on the back of the box is very interesting: ‘Humee’ name is derived from the legend of Huminodun, the pure Kadazan Dunsun girl who sacrificed herself to save the people of North Borneo from the devastation and suffering of a very long drought. Nowadays, Huminodun’s sacrifice is honored by the selection of the Unduk Ngadau or Runduk Ngadau Pageant during the yearly Harvest Festival Celebration. As with the Indian dolls I found in Leh in Ladakh, these dolls are not intended for kids. They’re really about representing a culture to other adults as tourist souvenirs. The dolls are poor quality, but the costumes and beading are lovely.
Although I haven’t been to Japan, my husband did a photographic tour there, so I had to add this exquisite geisha doll as one of the most recognizable dolls symbolizing Japan. She is about 8 inches tall and made of porcelain with inset glass eyes, hallmarks of a very well-crafted geisha doll. She is dressed in a beautiful silk kimono in colors worn in high summer or fall. The significance of the string of pearls eludes me, although probably refers to Japan’s famous cultured pearls. I found her in an opportunity shop [a thrift store, usually run for a charity] — always a good place to start looking for unusual dolls.
Outlier Dolls
This doll was part of a street art installation in Cuba. The doll is from a European tradition of the court fool or court trickster, and the shoes are medieval. It reminded me of the long and complicated history of Cuba, but also has a lot more to do with modern ideas of identity and difference in this particular setting, which was also a hangout for gay people in Cuba and nothing to do with ethnic identity.
Most dolls in the last 150 years or so have become standardized due to industrialization and have largely reflected Western culture. That started to change in the last half of the 20th century. However, the three examples shown on this page are way out of their comfort zone, for different reasons. The thing is, dolls convey messages about all sorts of things, and that’s what makes them so interesting.
An antique doll from 1906-1912 in the Casa Milá (La Pedrera), designed by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. She’s dressed using vintage lace and some rather nice silk and certainly looks old enough, but the dress looks a little too Victorian rather than Edwardian, and really doesn’t fit with Gaudí’s unique art deco feeling. Something along the lines of a Gustave Klimpt Barbie would be far more suitable, even though she wasn’t around at the time.
I don’t recall seeing a single doll in the markets on our Silk Road tour, but we weren’t in any modern parts of cities to any great extent, so that was not surprising. Uzbekistan is a secular Muslim country, so you won’t see women wearing the hijab, for instance, but there is a long tradition of not representing the human form in Islam, and in traditional markets there were no dolls, just traditional crafts. I can tell you the carpets and miniature paintings were to die for, and my dioramas at home are well decked out with these miniature paintings.
I insisted we go to a toy shop in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, because I wanted to see what they had in the way of dolls, which wasn’t much. They did have this Western-style concert violinist in a lovely box with a great little violin and sheet music. She came in two variations of dress, one silver and the other gold. The doll seems to be quite well-articulated, even if the head and body don’t match. No prizes for guessing who she’s a copy of, and at $15 USD, she was very expensive in Uzbekistan.
So, that is the end of my little excursion into the world of dolls when traveling. I loved every minute of it!
Julie Manley lives in Canberra, Australia and mainly collects, repaints, and sews for fashion dolls. She originally trained as a potter at art school and has a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Sydney. She has had two exhibitions of her fashion dolls in regional galleries, one for the Canberra Museum and Gallery and the other for Albury Library and Museum. She also travels with her photographer husband to odd places.
![Although I haven’t been to Japan, my husband did a photographic tour there, so I had to add this exquisite geisha doll as one of the most recognizable dolls symbolizing Japan. She is about 8 inches tall and made of porcelain with inset glass eyes, hallmarks of a very well-crafted geisha doll. She is dressed in a beautiful silk kimono in colors worn in high summer or fall. The significance of the string of pearls eludes me, although probably refers to Japan’s famous cultured pearls. I found her in an opportunity shop [a thrift store, usually run for a charity] — always a good place to start looking for unusual dolls.](https://dollsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Japan-Geisha-381x800-1.jpg)
