ABSTRACT
Since hunters have taken up the use of firearms, anthropologists seem to have lost interest in weapons. The few who have shown interest have focused mainly on the issue of technical efficiency, comparing the virtues of traditional weaponry (bows and arrows, spears, blowguns . . .) with massproduced firearms.1 But as soon as the former disappear - whether materially or from the memory of the oldest informants - the latter are no longer mentioned, even in folk or "at home" studies. At best they are taken for granted and dismissed in a few lines. More often they are eliminated from anthropological investigation because they are not produced or decorated by the users themselves, as if they could not be matter for cultural investment. However, as Bromberger says (1979: 105), these objects "comme les mots, sont porteurs d'informations" (like words [these objects] too convey information).2
