Doll Baby
A doll baby is a doll made to stand for a person and worked on in their place. It is one of the oldest techniques in the Atlantic world - the European image-magic of wax and clay met the African use of figures and bundles, and the result appears in the collections as a domestic object that a worker makes and keeps.
The 'voodoo doll' of film and tourist shops is a twentieth-century invention with almost no relation to this practice: the pin-stuck effigy belongs to European image-magic and to Hollywood, and neither Louisiana Voodoo nor Haitian Vodou is centred on it. That is one of the clearest cases in the corpus of the difference between a tradition's own account and its marketing.
Symbols and forms
- Alternate Names
- Doll babyDollImagePoison doll (in hostile use)
Practice
- Purpose
- To work on a person at a distance through a figure that stands for them - to heal, to hold, to draw, to bind or to harm
- Magical Uses
- HealingLove attractionBindingHex breakingProtection
Nature and meaning
- Kind
- Practice
Details
- Region
- The southern United States and the Caribbean
- Era
- Attested in the twentieth-century collections; older in European and African practice
- Background
A doll baby is a doll made to stand for a person and worked on in their place. It is one of the oldest techniques in the Atlantic world - the European image-magic of wax and clay met the African use of figures and bundles, and the result appears in the collections as a domestic object that a worker makes and keeps. It is used benignly as often as not, to heal, to hold a child, to draw a person home, and its hostile form is the one that gets remembered.
- Practice
The doll is made from cloth, wax, clay or a root, and is given the person's name and something of them - a hair, a piece of clothing, a written name - so that it is the person for the purpose of the work. It is dressed, fed, spoken to, kept in a particular place, and treated according to the case: a healing doll is cared for, a binding doll is tied, a hostile doll is pierced or buried. Disposal at the end of the work is part of it.
- Keywords
- Doll babyDollImage magicFigurePoppetSympathetic magic
- Ethical Note
A doll baby made for a person who has not consented is work on their will, and the hostile form is straightforwardly an attack. The tradition's own distinction applies: a doll made to heal a sick child or to bring a wandering husband home is one thing, and a doll made to make someone suffer is the kind of work that has to be justified and that the worker is expected to refuse without cause. The corpus describes the object and not the making.
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