Anthropology of Play and Games
~ A seminar series organised by Hazel Andrews (Liverpool John Moores),
Kellynn Wee (UCL) and the RAI~
Tuesday 10 February 2026, 4.00 – 6.00pm GMT
This is an online event. Please register here
Cold War Toys in South America
Speaker: Jordana Blejmar (University of Liverpool)
chaired by Alyssa Grossman (University of Liverpool)
This paper will discuss a selection of toys manufactured, promoted, and commercialized in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay during the second half of the twentieth century. It will approach toys as dispositifs – that is, as cultural formations that condense the discourses, institutions, architectural forms, scientific statements, and philosophical propositions of a contested and turbulent period. The paper will present a rich compendium of manufactured objects – many inspired by European or U.S. brands – that incorporate local characters, messages, designs, and materials through a process of creative adaptation, thereby acquiring an identity of their own. These playthings are examined in part as commodities pertaining to a once-flourishing industry, but also as creators of cultural myths, material-narrative machines, training tools for Cold War childhoods, and objects imbued with memory.
Jordana Blejmar is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of Liverpool. She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and received her doctorate at the University of Cambridge as a Gates scholar. She is author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and of Cold War Toys: Building Blocks, Miniatures and Models in the Latin American Southern Cone (UCL Press, forthcoming). She is also the co-editor of three books on art and politics in Latin America and has curated art and photography exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and Paris. She was the PI of the AHRC-funded project “Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina” (2022-2024).