Afterword: Weapons at the Threshold

Abstract

Weapons defy closure. They persist beyond their immediate function, crossing temporal, social, and moral boundaries. Rather than treating weapons merely as instruments of violence, the editors of this volume propose a relational approach, viewing weapons as things that gain meaning through their positions within complex social networks. The chapters reveal how weapons circulate through domains of gender, religion, politics, and representation, shaping and reflecting human relations. This Afterword adds a new analytical lens to this perspective, namely weapons as material forms that mark and enable transitions between states of being. Weapons operate at boundaries between sacred and profane, vulnerability and power, legality and illegality, or past and present. Future research should trace these thresholds ethnographically and historically. As objects that mediate change, weapons reveal not only how violence is structured, but also how social worlds are continually remade. This way, the study of weapons is the study of processes of passage, transformation, and meaning-making that bind human life to instruments of force and power.