We are an animal with a peculiar predilection: we conserve relations with the dead (and that which is not present). In this sense, we inwardly cache relationships. We also create funerary artifacts and conserve relationships through these. This is, in part, perhaps because we extend each other as we form relationships. We invite each other into broader expression and awareness. When this is lost, the sense of pain and impoverishment is almost palpable. But we have another way to conserve relationships, a way apparently almost as old as our culture. We make dolls. The intrinsic generality of the identity component creates a somewhat featureless catalytic context that our imagination rushes forth to embellish. And this is, perhaps, precisely why the dolls of our early ancestors are not particularly detailed; they are not meant to deliver an image but to activate the imagination.

They are stand-ins for the lost, the departed, and the invisible. We give them to our children who form nonordinary relationships with them, and we think this is ‘merely’ some developmental phase. What we are overlooking is just about everything. It’s not merely a developmental phase. It is a way of knowing as well as a cognitive technology. A set of ways, actually, with some extremely sophisticated effects that we are oblivious to because we know what to call it: a developmental phase.