tokens and totems

A historical question: suppose a fair lady gives a sleeve or glove to her favoured knight. What does she do with the remaining sleeve or glove? Put it under her pillow and dream of true love? Give it away too? Acquire a third matching sleeve or glove and go on wearing the appropriate outfit?

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I went to the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology yesterday. The arrangement is not quite what one would expect: there's a large central hall full of totem poles and similar carvings, but also a smaller gallery of ceramics (mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European), and then an area termed something like the 'open research collection' which contains an overwhelming amount of material, drawers and cases full of items from all over the world, with the occasional larger display organized by one anthropology class or another.

Memorable objects included:

• A statue of a bear, carved from cedar wood for the museum, which one is actually allowed to touch. It may have been painted at some point, though only red highlights now remain.
  
• Various carvings hollowed out like canoes, with human figures at prow and stern.
  
• Items made for trade by Turkish prisoners of war on Cyprus during World War I (I think?), including carved model guns with moving parts and beaded figures of lizards.
  
• A tiled German stove (for heating, not for cooking), originally assembled in the sixteenth century. Each tile had been pressed into a mold, to create a relief figure of a man or woman, and then brightly glazed. I thought of mmcnealy.