Very nicely put Fearn.
I cannot but agree wholeheartedly with what you have written.
However, now that you have so clearly defined the situation, I believe that you have opened the door for a look at this situation from a different perspective.
If we take, let us say, the jambiya as an example, we have an object that in its society of origin has a certain nature, however, once it moves outside that society and becomes an object for collection by people in a different society, the nature of the object changes.
In the new society where that jambiya finds itself, that is, the society of collectors of jambiyas living in places far removed from its point of origin, it is no longer looked at, nor thought about in the same way that it was in its society of origin. The collectors have made it their own, and have given it a nature that they can understand, which is based upon their own cultural frame of reference.
In the context of the society in which the jambiya now finds itself, it may be argued that it is perfectly legitimate for the members of that society to categorise it in accordance with their understanding of it, based upon their own frame of reference.
Accordingly, I would suggest that it is perfectly legitimate for a collector of jambiyas living in, say, New York, to refer to a jambiya as a dagger, because that is the way in which he understands it.
If some of those jambiya are a little too long to fit comfortably within the collector's cultural perception of a dagger, then the collector may certainly categorise these longer jambiyas as swords.
Why should he not do so?
He has removed the object from the cultural frame of reference within which it is understood in a certain way, and placed it within a different frame of reference.
Why should he not observe the rules which apply within that new frame of reference?
To summarise:-
if a collector wishes to refer to a jambiya as a dagger, then let that collector decide at what point his dagger becomes a sword, his decision will be as relevant for a jambiya as it will be for any weapon from his own culture, as he is using a frame of reference based in a culture that differs from the culture in which the jambiya originated.
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