Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers

Peterson, Nicolas

doi:10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.02a00050

Cited by 378 publications

(224 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The costs of not sharing could sometimes be too high to be worth paying. 89 The Blurton Jones "tolerated-theft" model showed that sharing could result if resources came in large but divisible lumps, but not to everyone at once, and if consumers were prepared to press claims for a share according to the nutritional value of the resource to them. As he noted, this need not mean incessant squabbling, since potential claimants gauging the interest and appetite of others would do better not to start fights they would be likely to lose.…”

Section: Box 1 Reciprocity In the Sharing Of Display Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Hawkes

Bird

2002

Evolutionary Anthropology

429

277

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Zahavi's1,2 handicap principle makes “waste” a common outcome of signal selection because the cost of a signal guarantees its honesty. The capacity to bear the cost reveals the show‐off's hidden qualities. While displays take many forms, some also provide fitness‐related benefits to the audience in addition to information about the show‐off. Zahavi3 has used the handicap principle to explain both merely wasteful displays and altruistic behavior. Here we focus on the distinction between these two kinds of display and the importance of benefits other than information in show‐off explanations of a particular puzzle in human evolution: men's work. Males of other primate species do not contribute any significant fraction of the food consumed by females and juveniles. Our own species is different. When people live on wild foods, hunting is usually a specialty of men, and meat is commonly a substantial component of everyone's diet. Here we explore the hypothesis that this unique male subsistence contribution may have evolved as hunting large animals became a focus of competitive display.

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Section: Box 1 Reciprocity In the Sharing Of Display Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men's work

Hawkes

Bird

2002

Evolutionary Anthropology

429

277

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“…Distribution of catch Incorporates personal consumption and sharing with kin and/or co-residents, including symbolic sharing associated with ritual events and prohibitions (Altman 1987, Peterson 1993, Barber 2005). 4…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The persistence of subsistence: qualitative social-ecological modeling of indigenous aquatic hunting and gathering in tropical Australia

Barber¹,

Jackson²,

Dambacher³

et al. 2015

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Subsistence remains critical to indigenous people in settler-colonial states such as Australia, providing key foundations for indigenous identities and for wider state recognition. However, the drivers of contemporary subsistence are rarely fully articulated and analyzed in terms of likely changing conditions. Our interdisciplinary team combined past research experience gained from multiple sites with published literature to create two generalized qualitative models of the socio-cultural and environmental influences on indigenous aquatic subsistence in northern Australia. One model focused on the longer term (inter-year to generational) persistence of subsistence at the community scale, the other model on shorter term (day to season) drivers of effort by active individuals. The specification of driver definitions and relationships demonstrates the complexities of even generalized and materialist models of contemporary subsistence practices. The qualitative models were analyzed for emergent properties and for responses to plausible changes in key variables: access, habitat degradation, social security availability, and community dysfunction. Positive human community condition is shown to be critical to the long-term persistence of subsistence, but complex interactions of negative and positive drivers shape subsistence effort expended at the individual scale and within shorter time frames. Such models enable motivations, complexities, and the potential management and policy levers of significance to be identified, defined, causally related, and debated. The models can be used to augment future models of human-natural systems, be tested against case-specific field conditions and/or indigenous perspectives, and aid preliminary assessments of the effects on subsistence of changes in social and environmental conditions, including policy settings.

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“…Ethnographers, missionaries, and others who have recorded contact with people in smallscale societies have often noticed (or complained) that members of small-scale societies constantly protest about not having enough to eat and harass visitors with request for gifts of food or tools or anything else they have that might be useful (Lee 1979: 458-60;Peterson 1993;Kelly 1995: 22;Hill and Hurtado 1996: 319-20;McCall 2000).…”

Section: B Expressed Preferencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many ethnographers have observed that hunter-gatherer bands (and some slightly larger-scale societies) throughout the world use a social mechanism anthropologists call "demand sharing" (Lee 1979: 458-60;Bird-David 1990: 195;Peterson 1993;Kelly 1995: 22;McCall 2000;Barnard 2004a: 12). The norm in band societies from the Arctic to the tropics appears to be: if you camp with us, you share what you have-at least when asked.…”

Section: Even Charles Darwin Complained About Natives Begging In Tiermentioning

confidence: 99%