Death, Reincarnation and Rebirth of BJDs
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis article addresses the phenomenon of adult doll collectors and the relationships they have with Ball Jointed Dolls (BJD’s) through the lens of contemporary animism. It makes a contribution to debates not only by bringing this novel phenomenon into theoretical conversation with the new animism, through which the modernist dualistic constructs that separate subject from object are challenged.
The general concept of the article is sound and interesting, as well as an underexplored area of research. The ethnographic storytelling of experiences conducting research is a delight, and the article is well written, accessible and easy to ready. I also find the article to be structurally sound, stating clearly from the outset what the reader can hope to find, and then following through with precision.
Religion, however, is not addressed in the article, apart from in relation to Tylor’s early definition of religion. Although the scope is wide for Religions, this makes me think that the article may work better for the scope outlined in the journal Humanities which has a wider scope, i.e. it covers human behaviour, cultural studies, transdisciplinary studies, philosophical perspectives, and more.
The coverage of BJD’s is as well covered and complete as it can be given that there is very little research done on the subject. The author does, however, address what existing literature there is (e.g. Ignacio and Cupchik, 2021) and fills this gap by covering the history of BJD’s extraordinarily well, alongside the social phenomenon of the BJD Community. From an ethnographic, anthropological perspective, this is fascinating. The author is right to compare their research with BJD’s to the Japanese phenomenon of robot companions. The author did, however, miss an opportunity to do at least a brief comparison of their fieldwork with BJD’s and their collectors with that of Catholic Marian Statues in places such as the Virgin of Alcala in Andalusia, Spain, where a BJD figure of the Virgin Mary statue sits at the heart of the community. While the case studies found in a few different publications about this do not typically refer the Virgin as a BJD (which appears to represent a specific social phenomena), the statue is a 700 year old ball and socket one that can be moved into different positions, and is dressed like a doll. In this case, the Virgin Mary is said to act. She has personality, presence and will; is spoken with and to using the animating language of ‘she’, and is ritually dressed and changed by a group of women who adore her.
This comparison would work well on Page 6 of the article. The difference in the case of Virgin Mary statue, is that this figure is powerful and performs miracles. The point is that cases such as this have been analysed in recent religious studies scholarship also using the lens of the new animism – as well as the fetish – the distinctions between which get to the heart of one of the paper’s assertions but from a different/religious context, i.e. that sometimes the BJD’s are ‘ensouled’ while at others they are treated as beings in their own right, capable of their own form of material agency, depending on the people (and BJD’s) taking part in the relationship. Hence bringing this in as a brief, comparative component may work to strengthen the article’s argument.
In terms of Interest to the Readers, the conclusions may be interested to a small number of the readers for Religions, especially those interested in religions and material cultures. Ball and socket/jointed statues are found in religious contexts such as the beforementioned Marian shrine in Spain, as well as in a wider range of religious contexts across Northern and Southern Europe. The debates raised in the article regarding the breaking down of the subject/object divide using the new animism can draw out some exciting comparative points between religious contexts that use BJD’s (although they aren’t framed as such), the active relationships had with these religious figures, and the contemporary secular context of BJD collectors.
Further, the relevance of this article can be found in the subject’s growing popularity in a range of disciplines from anthropology, sociology, the study of religions, and material culture studies. Scholarship is becoming more and more interested in the social process that reflect a wider, sweeping break down modern dichotomies – the ones that Bruno Latour spoke about when he wrote the classed text ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ (1993). These debates now represent a current zeitgeist.
Specific comments
The article is enlivening, interesting, and structurally sound. The images do the work they intended to do, which is to demonstrate the visual phenomena of BJD’s.
In terms of specific comments:
· Page 6, Line 9: The sentence starting “Although homosexuality is a tabooed topic in China…’ should be referenced. Is this Guo’s conclusion? I ask because I have a Chinese student doing a wide study in China about the Rainbow community, and she reports that the subject is met socially with neutrality.
· Page 6, Lind 25: This does not transition well. Why ‘However’? Was there a converse statement before that? Suggest changing transition statement to something like: ‘As it will be demonstrated in the next section, the growing BJD community…’
· Page 6, Line starting at 32: This line is not grammatically correct. Consider breaking up.
· Page 8, Line 17: Check the reference to Harvey’s work. I’m pretty sure he didn’t refer to the new animism as ‘neo-animism’. In other words, I suggest putting the 2006 date after ‘new animism’, and make clear that it is subsequent scholarship that refers to the new animism as ‘neo-animism’.
· Page 8: the discussion about new animism, personhood, and dolls should mention Amy R. Whitehead’s work about how the new animism applies to religious statues using the concept of relationality, i.e. that subjects and objects (animist persons) are co-created in moments of relationship, depending on the quality of the encounter. To leave this out would be a significant oversight in the article, and would strengthen the case.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors“Death, Reincarnation and Rebirth of BJDs”
This article examines the phenomenon of the “ball jointed doll” (BJD), with a focus on the deep affective relationships that develop between collectors and their dolls. The author argues that these relationships constitute the basis of a form of contemporary animism or neo-animism, a category that is then applied in an analysis of the creation, death, reincarnation, and rebirth of dolls. By the author’s account, this relational model of animism, in which the dolls are recognized as “ensouled” or animated—brought to life through relationships to their collectors—further commends “deconstructing” or “dissecting” the traditional subject/object dichotomy presumed by rational materialism. In addition, the author critically examines two forms of “hierarchy” that are called into question by the ensoulment of dolls: the hierarchy between collector and doll; and the deeply entrenched, anthropocentric hierarchy that posits human beings as distinct from and superior to other, non-human entities, whether organic/living or of human manufacture. In developing this account, the author provides concise historical contextualization for BJDs, offers a definition of BJDs, and stipulates some categories—e.g., reincarnation and rebirth—for thinking about BJDs and the culture that has grown around them. The author also raises the matter of attributing agency to (ostensibly) non-sentient entities, specifically dolls, and discusses the therapeutic and other imaginative possibilities posed by BJDs. Ultimately, the article makes the case that contemporary animism, with its “reminder” to “reassess” dualities like subject/object and human/nonhuman, characterizes the relationship between doll and collector, which in turn engenders “new realities and landscapes of thinking beyond the scope of binary relationships between human and other than human beings.”
The prose in this article is, overall, lucid, though there are several infelicitous or ungrammatical phrasings that mar the clarity of the text. (One assumes these will be eliminated in the copyediting stage.) The article exhibits a clear and logical structure. In the introduction, the author offers a brief methodological statement, indicating the kind and range of data that are invoked and analyzed in the subsequent account, as well as the means of collecting and interpreting that data. The author then presents a broad discussion of the inception and evolution of BJD culture, while also articulating the characteristics defining various iterations of BJDs and modalities of the BJD community (both online and in-person). The author provides definitions of key concepts and categories pertaining to BJDs and BJD culture, including the terms announced in the article’s title (for instance, in addition to “reincarnation” and “rebirth,” the reader is also introduced to “reshelling”). The author then invokes neoanimism as an analytic for assessing the relationships that develop between doll and collector. The consideration of BJDs through the framework of neoanimism reveals the religious dimensions of the phenomenon that make it apt subject matter for Religions.
In this reader’s opinion, the article has three main virtues. First, as the author notes, scholarship on BJDs and BJD culture is “extremely scarce.” The scholarship that does exist presents mostly psychological and/or therapeutic perspectives on BJDs. Scholarship from a religious-studies perspective, such as this article presents, is quite welcome; one hopes this article will inspire further investigation from within the field of religious studies.
Second, as noted above, the article introduces and articulates several categories pertaining to BJD culture, introducing readers to the nuances of the production and life cycles of dolls and the features that characterize many collector-doll relationships.
Third, the author’s use of the category of neo-animism is novel and productive, affording readers a sense of how such intense relationships form between doll and collector and why they are interesting and worthy of study. Use of neoanimism as an interpretive lens also corresponds to and fosters what the author intends as an ethical orientation according to which the human is placed on the same level as nonhuman entities.
In these ways, the article makes an original and useful contribution to the study of BJDs while also suggesting a new area of inquiry for scholars interested in the varieties of animistic experience. For these reasons, I recommend publication pending some revision.
In the remainder of my comments, I wish to call attention to some points in the article that the author (and editors) may wish to revisit, whether for further conceptual elaboration, definitional clarification, or factual precision.
Concerning method
The author states that the data that forms the basis of the paper’s analysis and commentary derives from “numerous extensive semi-structured interviews conducted in person and online with BJD collectors from Europe and the US over a period of two years [….] There were 65 interviews conducted for the entire project, 30 of which were specifically used for this paper. The data also comes from questionnaires filled out in several doll conventions in Europe [….] Being a participant observer in several BJD meets has also contributed significantly to this paper” (p. 1).
A few questions the author may wish to address:
-- “There were 65 interviews conducted for the entire project, 30 of which were specifically used for this paper.” What exactly is “the entire project” as opposed to “this paper”? What exactly is the broader project of which this paper is apparently one part?
-- Why were just 30 of the 65 interviews used in this paper? What criteria informed the decision about which 30 interviews were selected from among the 65 total? It’s also not clear exactly why the author selects this or that example to focus on in the commentary. Without a statement on how the interviews were selected, it’s not entirely clear what motivates the choices of examples—why they are held up as exemplary.
-- Might the author wish to reflect upon what the article’s focus on Europe and the US means with regard to broad conclusions that are extended to Asian BJD collectors and communities, which, as the author notes, are such a large part of global BJD culture? Does extrapolating from this European and US/American data call into question any of the paper’s premises, points, or conclusions as they pertain to Asian BJD contexts?
-- Would it be helpful to provide an example of a questionnaire that was used in gathering data?
Other comments and questions
-- The artist Hans Bellmer is a (arguably the) key figure in the inception of BJD culture. The treatment of Bellmer in this paper is quite scant, though perhaps no more is needed, given the paper’s scope and aims. That said, it’s a bit disheartening to find that Bellmer’s name, which appears just twice, in consecutive sentences, is in both instances misspelled. (It appears as “Bellmar.”) (There’s also some redundancy in the two sentences containing his name: “…the German artist Hans Bellmar. Bellmar was a German artist…”) Perhaps the misspelling is a trivial error, but given the importance of this artist in the context of the history of BJDs, the error is a bit disconcerting, at least to this reader.
-- The category of (neo)animism is productive. That said, one might wish that the author were somewhat more explicit—less equivocal or circumspect—in dealing with some of the assumptions underlying, and questions arising around, the analytical framework of neoanimism. For instance, often the author seems to affirm (or to assume the validity of) their interview subjects’ account of dolls as being imbued with an innate “living essence” or being “ensouled” through relationships to their owners/collectors. At other points, however, the paper’s rhetoric qualifies such positions, as when the author observes that in the process of “character creation” the doll “seems to have a certain agency” (my emphasis). In future work, perhaps the author can contend explicitly with the ontological question suggested here, as well as with the matter of a “certain” agency? (What work is the word “certain” doing here? What is going unsaid, unaddressed? What questions/problems do “seems” and “a certain” obfuscate?)
Similarly, the author sometimes resorts to use of the passive tense in a manner that circumvents direct engagement with questions that arise around the agency of objects. For instance, on p. 14, the author uses the passive voice multiple times, as when writing that the aforementioned “certain agency of the doll is also recognized. The sovereign agency of the doll is acknowledged when there is remorse for the BJD…” Especially in light of the context concerning agency, ensoulment of dolls, and the like, one might want to see actions like recognizing and acknowledging more directly and explicitly ascribed to a specific agent. Who is acknowledging the agency of the doll? The collector? The doll?
Similarly, on p. 15, the author writes that “in this way the dolls ‘demand’ and ‘acquire’ their autonomous agency.” What work is being done by placing “demand” and “acquire” in scare quotes? What does the author intend by use of these marks? It seems the author wishes both to assert and to call into question the agency of the dolls. Is this something that could be addressed in a less equivocal manner?
The author makes what sounds like an ontological claim when stating, for example, that “the doll is infused with life by the collector and here the doll and the collector transcends [sic] the person/thing, subject/object divide diffusing into each other.” This is a somewhat awkwardly phrased sentence, I think, but the question I’m raising here has to do with the nature of the claim itself. The author seems to be affirming a kind of ontological transformation—a “real” change in the status of the doll/collector, with each blending into the other. But elsewhere, as I’ve noted, the author hedges.
-- On a related note, given the emphases on de-hierarchizing human/nonhuman and investigating the ensouling or animating of non-sentient things, one might wish to see, perhaps in future work, further engagement with thing theory and object-oriented ontology. Jane Bennett’s work is briefly referenced, as is the work of Malafouris et al. A more sustained account of agency and the status of things through deeper engagement with these discourses (thing theory, ooo) might bring further nuance to the author’s account. Further, one suspects that developing the intersection of thing theory with animism more deeply could produce further new insights.
-- The paper would seem to have been submitted to Religions on the basis of its use of the category of (neo)animism. But as the author notes early in the introduction, “throughout the course of history, dolls have transitioned from being ritual objects to children’s playthings and are often viewed as juvenile artifacts.” This is true, but this brief gesture toward “ritual” doesn’t do service to the possibilities of “ritual” as it pertains to the history of dolls or as an analytic category. Given both the scope of Religions, as well as the historical context and modern cultures around BJDs, one might like to see more attention paid to the ritual dimensions of dolls.
-- Similarly, given the prevalence of BJD culture in China, Japan, and South Korea, one might like to see further reflection on both methodology (as noted above) and historical context. How does the history of dolls in Asia inform contemporary BJD culture? How, if at all, does it differ from European and/or US-American culture? For instance, there is one mention of Buddhism in this paper; might deeper investigation of Buddhist beliefs help one understand BJD cultures both within and beyond their Asian contexts?
--In the first sentence of the brief historical overview (“History of BJDs,” p. 4), the author presents Akihiro Enku as the maker of the “first contemporary BJD for the Volks Company,” noting that the artist sculpted a doll that served as the model for Volks’s first “commercially produced … Super Dolfie (SD) dolls.” Akihiro Eku, the author then states, created “the first contemporary BJD.” The author goes on to note that Hans Bellmer was “one of the first artists to create a contemporary ball jointed doll and to photograph them. After the success of the first BJD, BJD companies started growing in East Asia, especially in Japan, Korea and China.”
A few issues to note here:
First, with regard to the claim that Akihiro Enku made the “first contemporary BJD for the Volks Company,” there is both a phraseological and a terminological ambiguity.
I’ll address, first, the phraseological ambiguity by way of these questions: Did AE make the first contemporary BJD, as context seems to suggest, especially given that the author goes on to refer to “Akihiro Enku’s creation of the first contemporary BJD”? Or did AE make the first contemporary BJD for the Volks Company? I take the latter to be true, but if this is the case, the fact is obfuscated or skewed by the phrasing and context, which suggest that AE makes the first contemporary BJD period. However, the author then recognizes that Bellmer was “one of the first artists to create a contemporary ball jointed doll”—but Bellmer was working decades before Akihiro Enku, undertaking his first doll in the early 1930s. Some clarification/rectification of historical facts/timeline is needed here, I think.
As for the related terminological ambiguity: What precisely is intended by the qualifier “contemporary” in “contemporary BJD”? The author at first seems to indicate that contemporary means sometime around the late 1990s, when “the first contemporary BJD” was made. But the author then uses “contemporary” to characterize Bellmer’s dolls from the ‘30s. Are Bellmer’s dolls “contemporary”? If so, what does this mean with regard to the author’s claims concerning Akihiro Enku’s doll being the first “contemporary” doll design? Again, clarification/rectification is needed.
Second, At least one major figure in the history and development of BJD culture is missing from this account: Japanese dollmaker Yotsuya Simon, who I believe is widely recognized as the earliest practitioner of BJD-making in Asia. Simon encountered a photo of Bellmer’s doll in the 1960s and consequently shifted his practice to focus on the creation of BJDs. Simon’s dolls thus predate Akihiro Enku’s dolls by decades. Should Simon’s work be acknowledged in the historical overview?
-- Regarding the author’s stipulation of the definition of BJD as “dolls with ball and socket joints strung together by a thick elastic”: is the latter element—being strung together by a thick elastic—a necessary condition for qualifying as a BJD? Are there dolls that might/should fall into this category but that do not include thick elastic? In other words, must a doll with ball joints also include thick elastic stringing in order to count as a BJD? (Did Bellmer’s dolls include elastic? Simon’s?) If this is not an essential feature, perhaps the definition should be modified? (Also, the phrase “strung together with a thick elastic,” which differs from the author’s phrase only thanks to the author’s swapping of “by” for “with,” appears in the Wikipedia entry on BJDs. This may not be any problem, but perhaps it’s worth flagging; the author may wish to revise the phrasing to differentiate it further from the Wikipedia entry.)
-- The author claims that thinking in terms of (neo)animism is a “reminder to reassess subject/object, living/non-living, human and nonhuman duality and compose non-hierarchical structures of de-centering human and re-centering relationships of human and other than human beings.” It is clear that the author takes this reassessment and de-centering to be an ethical good, but there’s no explicit indication as to why the author takes it to be so; it appears as an assumption whose ethical import (its goodness) is self-evident. And perhaps it is or should be. But might a clear and concise articulation of why these things are good not only help clarify the ethical content of the claim but also make more clear why/how BJD culture is valuable to these ends? I think a brief statement of this sort could make certain points about the value and ethical possibilities of BJDs more salient.
-- The author refers to the work of Bird David, who offers “the concept of animism as relational epistemology.” It’s not clear from what the author provides exactly why/how animism qualifies as an epistemological framework. The author writes about the “communication” and “reciprocity” that develops “between human and the other than human person who can constitute of any material or non-material being [sic].” Apart from the grammatical problem with this sentence, neither it nor the surrounding context, which deals with “personhood” and “responsibility,” make clear what the epistemological element really consists in (though the reader can make inferences). The problem is intensified by this sentence: “When animism is perceived in relational epistemology [sic], the person/being is composed of the relationship they entail.” There’s something tautological about this phrasing, which makes it sound as if perceiving animism as (or in?) relational epistemology engenders a being that is composed of the relations that it composes. And I’m not quite clear on what it means to say that a person is “composed of the relationship they entail.” Who/what is “they” here? The person? And if the person “entails” (causes?) the relationship, how are they also composed by that relationship? Clarification would be welcome here.
-- The matter is further confused on p. 14, where the author now invokes not relational epistemology but relational ontology in a manner that suggests the two are synonymous: “The doll relates, responds acts [sic] and behaves relative to their collector creating a relational ontology of animism.” Is there a conceptual slippage here, or are there two distinct categories at play—relational epistemology and relational ontology? What precisely distinguishes between the two?
Comments on the Quality of English Languagesee attached comments
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
