Consider the “purpose” of a clothing model. While some prospective customers will imagine “switching places” with the dummy, themselves wearing the displayed clothing, others may take comfort in the featureless non-humanity of certain dummies.

Here in Jordan, this may also relate to Islamic belief in “aniconism”, or the discouraging of the depiction of sentient beings in artwork. Our fixer didn’t know off-hand why or how this distinctive family of dummies came to inhabit so many storefronts across downtown Amman, but the models were a frequent source of entertainment for her and her friends, and she knew of at least one person working on a photo essay about this unique species of dummies.