Thread: Shabria Dagger
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Old 2nd April 2005, 08:58 PM   #13
tom hyle
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Houston, TX, USA
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Probably post- Certainly no real comparison is to be made to the decorator khoumiyas with the flat "tin" blades snipped out of sheet metal. This sort of dagger is sold initially by a cutler, and though numbers of them certainly are bought by foreigners either from the cutlers or on the secondary market, I am unable to comprehend the viewing of this process in a different light than with a German or Itallian knife; the whole concept of the "tourist knife" is overplayed, and perhaps rather ethnocentric, IMHO, with modern using and decorator pieces for native consumption often improperly painted with the brush. I usually consider "decorator" or similar terms more accurate for the useless wallhanging type items, but I certainly consider these shabrias as using daggers. Certainly in modern times they see less use than their ancestors, much as with the stacked-handle Spanish colonial/Mediterranean dirks we recently discussed, but this does not imply an entirely vestigial weapon/tool. Many rural N Americans carry "hunting knives" as they often term them; bowie knives usually; I'm not sure why people think the knife is a "dead" or obsolete artifact; it's something to do with industrial city culture that predisposes toward this ideation, which isn't even valid or fully accepted within that culture.
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