Tag Archives: hunter gatherers

THE BLOWGUN (sarbacane)

The Blowgun

A blowgun is a hollow tube out of which a dart or an arrow is blown. The projectile is usually tipped with a poison, like curare, to stun or kill prey. Usually used for hunting and rarely in warfare, blowguns vary in length from 18 in (45 cm) to over 23 ft (7 m) and are often crafted from cane or bamboo. The arrows, made to fit snugly in the gun’s tube, are fashioned from palm leaf midribs or bamboo splinters. Blowguns were widely used by prehistoric peoples and are still used in what locations? More… 

From Wikipedia:

The blowgun is a weapon used in the fighting art Ninjutsu and certain tribes of hunter-gatherers, particularly in South America .

The sport blowgun, called blowgun or blowpipe in English (and Fukiya in Japanese), is a sports of shooting of darts on target dot. The blowgun is a modern tube aluminum (max 122 cm, 1016 cm diameter) with a mouthpiece, which propels the breath of the drawer 5 small darts in steel with a small conical plastic.   

The target is a single official printed A4 sheet and attached to a cardboard, foam, compressed straw or another. It has three circles of radius 3, 6 and 9 cm, equal to 7, 5 and 3 points from the center. The distance to the target ranges from 4 to 10 meters according to FSSA 1 .

For teaching in schools, mini-shields of archery will be used (with 5 colors from the periphery to the center: white, black, blue, red and yellow).

Historically, France, the blowgun sport was practiced in the mining areas of the departments of Nord and Loire . If this historical practice of the blowgun seems to have disappeared in the North, she is still alive in the region of Saint-Etienne (see article Sarbacane (Loire) ).

The practice of the blowpipe is not only very simple and surprising, but also has beneficial effects on health (abdominal and chest muscles, respiration, blood oxygenation, concentration, stress) and can be framed as young as 6 years.    More…