Re-stitching and strengthening community: Three global examples of how doll-making translates into well-being in Indigenous cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Traditional doll-making has important meanings that translate into personal and communal identity. As one of the earliest discovered play artefacts, dolls are deeply intertwined with symbolic meanings around spirituality, rituals, familial histories and communal traditions. These values are especially important in Indigenous groups where health and well-being pivots on the preservation of cultural heritage. This article develops the theory on the well-being functions of doll-making through the exploration of three different practices in Indigenous cultures across the globe. We explore the Gomeroi Yarning dolls (Australia), Six Nations Cornhusk dolls (Canada) and Siyazama Zulu dolls (South Africa) to show that, through building the expression of local community-level identity, these dolls support Indigenous world-views around well-being. Specifically, the Gomeroi Yarning dolls encourage the sharing of oral personal narratives, the Six Nations Cornhusk dolls promote the transmission of cultural teachings, and the Siyazama Zulu dolls create community support networks through locally relevant HIV/AIDS awareness. As a result, local Indigenous communities are strengthened through the space that is created for a healing process, capacity building for problem-solving, and the reclaiming of Indigenous identity. All of these factors are important steps for moving forward from the silence, dealing with trauma and difficult situations, and thus transforming pain and grief through cross-cultural communication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".