ABSTRACT
Toys are essential to our initiation into the world. It is by playing with toys that we understand how things work, act out situations, learn about rules, and imagine alternative worlds with different rules. Anything can be used as a toy as long as it lends itself to be played with. For toys, as Miguel Sicart remarks, ‘are the matter of play’ (2014, p. 43). As vehicles for the imagination, toys have traditionally taken the form of miniature replicas of real-life objects and people. Their legacy persists even in the era of computer games. Toy stores offer a large variety of miniatures from teddy bears to action gures to Lego and Playmobil sets. The mini ature toy ‘opens an interior world, lending itself to fantasy and privacy’ (Stewart, 1999, p. 56) and empowering the one playing with it. ‘The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it’, as Gaston Bachelard asserts (1994, p. 151). At the same time, miniature toys are also the means for the world to possess us. From dollhouses to action gures, miniature toys operate as tools to indoctrinate children with a set of values and norms (Sutton-Smith, 1986; Kuznets, 1994; Fleming, 1996; Merlock Jackson, 2001; Perry, 2013, p. 76).
