The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

For the purposes of this report, the reciprocity category includes risk-buffering exchange, buy-product cooperation, trade, and the show-off/costly signaling model. The common denominator is that meat or fish is being transferred in exchange for another good, whether that be a service, attribute, or good (Trivers 1971). In this case the social morality is one of a fair deal. If the fair deal is not achieved, one would expect the flow of food resources to end (Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, Axelrod 1984). It appears that reciprocal exchanges are relatively rare in food sharing in Ust Avam, although food exchange has been argued to functionally reduce consumption variance in other Arctic hunting and gathering societies (e.g., Smith 1991).

The third type of model is a game where individuals in the community are categorized as a producers or seekers (or both, i.e., circumstantialist) for meat (cf. Vickery et al. 1991). In this model, decisions are economic in nature, where the costs of defending resources, the diminishing value of additional portions of a resource, the high value of initial portions of a resource, and the costs of maintaining a duel strategy of alternatively producing and seeking food are considered. Certain cosmological traditions among the Dolgan and Nganasan appear to be ancestral strategies, encouraged through elder's communication, which sets up a social morality of giving gifts to others without expectations of returns of equal value. Thus, the social morality fosters provisioning to seekers and circumstantialists, most likely as part of a descendant-leaving strategy that was successful in past environments.

An evolutionary historical question is posed in Hawkes (2001) and Hawkes and Bliege Bird (2002). The main problem in food sharing is why men hunt big game, at times to the avoidance of easily obtainable small game and plant foods. Invoking the free-rider concept from game theory (Hawkes 2002:59), the proposed conundrum is that if free riders (seekers) are supported, and they are not relatives, then how could the big-game hunting evolve in the first place? The show-off hypothesis builds on the idea that by successfully hunting large game supplying goods to those present, hunters build and maintain reputations as a valuable neighbors and allies: "No one can rely on his predictable successes, but many expect to gain from them. By this argument others choose to join or stay with him because of the connection between him and the chances to claim meat" (Hawkes 2001: 228). Being a good hunter/valuable neighbor and ally eventually translates into a reproductive benefit, as men with better reputations have been observed to: marry harder working wives, more successful mothers, and women who have children faster and with better survivorship; marry younger (and so more fertile) women; have more success at repeatedly displacing reproductively competitive suitors than hunters with poor reputations (Hawkes 2001: 228-229).

Hawkes and Bleige Bird extend the show-off hypothesis to the effects of hunting in storytelling and reputation building, developments that could have only come about after the evolution of language. On an evolutionary time-scale, "both signaler and audience preference for more effective and competitive signals can drive the evolution of displays toward increasing social benefits" (Hawkes and Bliege Bird 2002:65). They borrow from Zahavi's (1975, 1977) handicap principle for the evolution of costly signals, or apparently "wasteful" traits, such as a male peacock tail feathers: costly signals guarantee honesty because of their costs, and so make signaling systems stable. For men, they argue, showing-off by providing an honest signal in meat, benefits accrue from the attention-i.e., desirability as a mate.