The Cookie Canister

My parents moved to a “senior living community” several weeks ago. I wound up with the metal cookie canister we grew up with, but I gave it to my sister because I had a good idea she would value having it far more than I would. (It may be ironic for a historian, but I’m not usually much interested in my own past.)

I was right. She hopped online and figured out who made the old thing (J.L. Clark, Chicago), and she wrote an evocative description of it and rendering of her childhood memory of it.

First, the radical difference between the experience of this object for the adult who purchased it and that of a child who experienced it, as only a child can, reminds us both that children and adults are radically different beings, and that what is a casual decision on the part of an adult can be a powerful experience for a child, planted deep into her lasting consciousness, with a panoramic visual memory, as if seen so much more up-close than an adult would see it. Even I remember the raised painted star, moon, and diamond shapes on that thing, and how they fascinated me—and how big they were. (They’re maybe an inch and three-quarters.) Children are imaginative but also literal; to me, they were the moon, star, and diamond—in white paint, from the dark sky.

It's unlikely my mother still remembered, even when we were kids, buying that cookie canister. My sister and I will die with clear, if truncated, memories of it—not just the cookies in it, which anyone would rightly assume a child would appreciate—but the canister itself.

Can we separate the memory of the object itself—the canister, what it looked like, felt like—from its purpose—to hold cookies that, as my sister’s recollection recounts with reverence, we could access without permission early on Saturday mornings while our parents slept in? I don’t think so. Someone who saw the canister in a museum case or an ebay listing could, perhaps, see all that we actually saw when we looked at it, but with no associated memory, it would likely evoke nothing of significance in them. Objects are tied strongly to our memories of them; if we don’t have those, then we have to explain them, in language, if we want someone else to understand their significance to us.

I remember seeing Aztec figurines in the Guggenheim in New York. It struck me that, no matter how well-written and thorough the exhibit labels were, people like me could have only the dimmest idea of what such objects meant to the people who made them and interacted with them—those who had memories associated with them, evoked by them. The further away we are from the culture that produced and used an object, the harder it will be for us to appreciate it. It gets lost in translation. That is why I am so profoundly moved by top-shelf historical anthropology; because it requires such transcendent insight and wisdom for a human to go inside another culture completely enough to write words in my language that allow me to do the same, just a little bit. Just enough so that I’m not completely at sea; and so that I have an expressible grasp of the depth of the chasm that separates my subjectivity from that of an aboriginal Australian or an Apache or an Aztec.

Could I explain cookies, and the significance of Saturday-morning television cartoons to primary-school children in the U.S. in the 1970s, to an aboriginal Australian or an Apache or an Aztec? Where would I even start?

I could place cookies inside the canister and put the lid on it, and that would be understood instantly by just about any human from any place or time—especially if the cookies were good, and the foreigner got to taste one. But there is so much more to what my sister remembered about that cookie canister than that—food, and her fraught love of it; her parents, me, Saturday-morning temporary freedom and indulgence; reward and punishment; what being a child was actually like for her—something she can still access, at 53. The aesthetic (writ large) is so much more difficult to convey than the utilitarian—but in material culture, the aesthetic is just as important, even in objects we tend to see primarily as utilitarian.

It's worth our best effort. The objects we use—in all the ways we use them—can explain so much about who we are and what we experience. They are tangible conduits to the intangible. A cheap cookie canister, purchased casually on a routine errand, soon forgotten, can reconnect an adult to her childhood, powerfully. What might it be able to do for someone 500 years from now?

Diana Young, “The Life and Death of Cars: Private Vehicles on the Pitjanjatjara Lands, South Australia,” in Daniel Miller, ed., Car Cultures, 35—58 (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

For a short tour-de-force in what I mean about trying to get inside another culture, try aboriginal Australia—even now. Young’s prose is clear and straightforward; her subject will bend your brain.

Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996).

I read about 150 books as a doctoral student. This is the only one that made me cry. There are other worlds in this world. Basso takes us inside one of them, and leaves us in awe.