I agree that the billhook and the machete are different beasts.
However, I think we need to remember what ethnographic is about (at least in my opinion).
Ethnographic does not mean hand made, it means an artifcat of a culture, used to understand that culture.
The interesting thing about the machete is its ethnography. There are certainly handmade machetes (gorgeous ones, even), but "standard" machetes are a product on the industrial age. Industrial practices allowed the creation of the thin, highly tempered steel blades characteristic of most machetes, and colonialism, imperial politics, and global trade meant that these blades were distributed all over the world (as trade, industrial, and military goods), based on designs from all over the world, and locally modified from industrial products all over the world.
In a real sense, machetes are the ultimate "trade blades," and as ethnographic objects, we need to study them as pieces of our global culture, not exotic artifacts.
My 0.000002 cents,
F
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