House Funerals and Honoured Containers: How Our Objects Tell Our Stories

In my life, I’ve been to many types of funerals: boisterous celebrations of life in arenas and garages, somber masses in churches and funeral homes, and events that fell somewhere in between. Some funerals were more public than others, some of them were sadder than others, but all of them were an occasion to mark the life of the person and gave others a chance to honour the person’s memory.

Recently, I went to what some have described as a house funeral. You’ve maybe been to a housewarming party: a gathering when people move in to a new house? This was the opposite. It was a celebration to say farewell to a home that has been in my family for three generations. During the evening, some people shared memories about their time in the house, some gave prepared speeches, some brought mementoes or pictures, some watched quietly from the sidelines. We gathered, we ate, we shared. There were tears, there was laughter. And then we went home, knowing that, though the house would no longer be ours, it was moving on to another stage of its existence with some other people.

You may wonder what a house funeral may have to do with traditional food… The link between objects and people is absolute. Have you ever had a mini funeral to burn your ex’s letters or presents or even take the time to pack up the person’s belongings and return them? This was because the objects held a significance, a reminder, a set of memories you no longer wanted to confront.

Objects, including our homes, are inherent to any tradition.

To study traditions we need to look at the objects we use and understand how they shape the narratives we tell.

In material culture studies, objects are acknowledged as having their own biographies (see below for a list of sources). If autobiography and ethnography are the study of a human’s possibilities and experiences in a given place and time, J. Prown explains that studying material objects similarly allows us to “understand culture [and thus] discover the beliefs – the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions – of a particular community or society at a given time” (p. 1). This is because “human-made objects reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of the individuals who commissioned, fabricated, purchased, or used them and, by extension, the beliefs of the larger society to which these individuals belonged” (p. 1).

As Sidney Mintz explains in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, because the study of material objects is “concerned with how people stubbornly maintain past practices, even when under strong negative pressures, but repudiate other behaviors quite readily in order to act differently, these materials throw light upon the historical circumstances from a perspective different from the historian’s” (p. i). Arjun Appardurai calls this the “social life” of objects in his “Introduction” to The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective because, essentially, objects interact with humans and allow them to behave in specific ways.

Sometimes, as with the house in my first example, we don’t a have choice but to let go of an object we love. Other times, as with my Viking funeral example, we actively destroy the objects that no longer serve us. Other times, however, we keep objects in our lives even when they don’t serve simply because we love the story so much. These container I got from my mother are an example of an object that I “stubbornly” hold on to. Let’s unpack the story these containers tells.

These containers have been a staple commodity in my life. My mother, an avid baker who made all our snacks for the longest time, used these containers multiple times a week, if not daily. They lived on our counter in Chisholm, moved to Astorville with us, and then made their way into my parents’ current home. When my mother upgraded her storage to efficient plastic containers that wouldn’t clutter the counter, she decided it was time to let them go.

These containers now live in my house in a very inconvenient place on my counter. Part of me dislikes them a lot – it’s a pain to pull them off the shelf at the back of the counter that always gets jammed up with fruit and Tupperware and my coffee.

While keeping the white sugar in the one is handy (I really dislike getting grains of sugar all over the place when I take sugar out of the bag), I find it annoying to fill the one that should contain flour. It would, of course, be logical to have the big flour bag downstairs and to just fill the container, BUT, going downstairs to get the stuff is an extra step in an already busy life and, let’s be real, who has time for that? Instead, the 2kg flour bag lives on the floor in the kitchen and the pretty container remains empty on the counter a few feet away. It’s riddiculous, I know. But, to be honest, keeping the container empty and the kitchen cluttered is ultimately way better than being frustrated with its perpetual emptiness. To use it like I should has already proven to be a source of irritation since no one ever fills it up – not even me.

So why keep them? Or why keep both? If it was up to my husband, they’d have gone to the dump years ago. I keep them because of the story I believe they share about who I am. When I see them, I see that I am a baker, I am a mom who makes food for her kids’ lunches, I care about homemade over store bought deserts, and I am part of a long line of women who care for their families through food.

Does anyone else get all of that when they see my containers? Probably not. Is that story even true? Only partly. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that it’s the story I tell myself even if I don’t bake like I used to and even if I do buy store-bought cookies for lunches more often than I make them. When my daughters pick up the containers while making the foods of my childhood, I see them connecting with the larger story of who they are. And that connection matters. When they ask where the containers come from, we talk about my mother and my childhood and the food and kitchen of my childhood. I image grandchildren someday using them and the story continuing.

So… times change, but some stuff, like these containers, still connects me to who I was and reminds me of who and what I want to be. In that way, these containers are social beings who interact with the members of my household. They have a power because they are present.

What objects tell stories about you? I’d love to hear about them!

Sources

Arjun Appardurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Edited by Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63.

Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Edited by Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64- 91.

Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), i.

J. Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?” History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, Edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 1.

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