The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

I would like to point out that Natasha Chuprina's statement mentions two points that are highly significant to the kinship model of food sharing: 1) the fact that the woman to whom they give meat is a relative with children, who have high nutritional needs and vulnerability, and 2) that she is a single-mother who does not hunt or fish, which means that there is no internal source of meat and fish in her household. As a result, feeding the woman's children becomes a priority for relatives outside her nuclear family, and the single-mother's ability to repay gifts of meat and fish in kind are limited. The social morality is one of care, inclination to sacrifice time and energy, prosocial behavior (Batson 1991), and generalized reciprocity in Marshal Sahlins' terminology (1968, 1972). These values are necessary for understanding how individuals develop in a particular social milieu. A basic anthropological issue (Malinowski 1932, Radcliffe Brown 1950), the role of kinship may have been underscored in evolutionary ecological studies of food sharing. One study showed that as the costs of transfer increase, other things being equal, closer kin were favored in food transfer (Betzig and Turke 1986). More detailed discussion of these theoretical problems is provided below.

The second model is based on reciprocity in the widest sense. Risk buffering, or delayed reciprocity, of food items has been accorded special significance in the anthropological literature on hunter-gatherer sharing (Kaplan and Hill 1985, Winterhalder 1997, Cashdan 1985, Halstead and O'Shea 1989). Immediate-return cooperation, where the cooperative effort is associated with division of the procurement may also be a form of reciprocity, where cooperative effort is exchanged for mutual benefit. In addition, trade and exchange of food items for other goods can be a form of reciprocity, where the reciprocal intentions are to achieve a fair deal. In all cases, the social morality is one of "balanced reciprocity" (Sahlins 1972). Unlike the kinship model, reciprocity models make no assumption about the genealogical relatedness of the cooperators. An expectation of reciprocal behavior or intention, when needed and available, is important. One informant in Ust Avam answered that he gave fish to his friends "because they are friends. We don't count things. Maybe sometime they will do something [for me]. As it was, it was purely a human deed (po chelovecheskii)." Thus, with friendship, the emotional investment in the relationship may allow for returns, which are unequal, delayed, or in some other currency, such as moral support. Nevertheless, there is an expectation of some kind of future help or support, and it is this expectation, which likely drives these cooperative relationships, until it is disproved.

The social and emotion bonds between friends may be qualitatively similar as those between co-descendents (e.g. cousins, brothers), although the threshold at which one expects a friendship to be broken would be lower than that between kin, other things being equal. It is more difficult to forget a kinship relationship, although I have seen conflicts among Dolgan and Nganasan families that lead to disowning of kin at least on a temporary basis.

The third set of models considered in this paper is based on costs and benefits of defense of a resource (Blurton Jones 1987), the costs and benefits associated with seeking resources from others, and the costs and benefits of doing both. Anthropologists have termed the phenomenon of seeking resources from others in hunting and gathering societies "demand sharing" (Peterson 1993), based on social pressures to share the resource or the process of requesting food, where solicitations, tests, and substantiating assertions are made. In the economics of this model, what is of fundamental importance is the decreasing value of additional resource units. The first kilogram of a caribou, let us say, is very important to the hunter who has no meat at home. The 500th unit is not so valuable because of difficulty of transport, potential losses through poor storage conditions, or because of social costs (like taxes) imposed by other group members, the seekers and circumstantialists. By transferring the nth unit of the product to others for whom that unit is the first, and therefore, the most important, the hunter drastically increases the sum value of the product for the community. This model says nothing about material or social returns and it makes no prediction about genealogical relatedness.

A major consideration relevant to producers, seekers, and circumstantialist model for food sharing, to which I alluded earlier, has to do with who is encouraging the hunting of large game and their subsequent distribution. I argue that traditional proscriptions and prescriptions in the Dolgan and Nganasan community encourage food sharing. The quote from Vitaly Porotov states the food sharing formula as a law: