The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

Draft paper prepared for the 9th International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies,
Edinburgh, Scotland, September 9-13, 2002.

Abstract

This paper examines theoretical assumptions and expectations about hunter-gatherer food sharing in light of material from the Siberian Arctic. Theoretical assumptions and predictions of three models, each with relevance to evolutionary and socio-cultural ecology, are examined: a) kinship cooperation, b) reciprocity, and c) producers, seekers, and circumstantialists. The flow of hunted and gathered resources was documented among the Dolgan and Nganasan, indigenous peoples in north central Siberia with a complex history in czarist Russia and the Soviet Union. In the post-Socialist era, diminishing economic subsidies to remote communities has favored subsistence hunting and gathering, non-market distribution, and common-pool resource use. Considering systematic information on a number of relevant variables with food distribution, this research identifies the strategies through which and why the Dolgan and Nganasan are implementing non-market sharing patterns. This is significant for interpretation of human natures and anthropological economics of big-game hunting.

Introduction

Food sharing is a fundamental economic phenomenon in contemporary hunting-and-gathering societies, linked to issues of indigenous identity and sustainability (e.g., Freeman et al. 1998, Nuttall 1998). Food sharing has been recounted in anthropological writings, where the logic of the gift (Mauss 1967), immediate- and delayed-returns (Woodburn 1968, 1982), foodstuffs exchange (Tonkinson 1978), cooperative hunting and camp-wide sharing (Turnbull 1987 [1961]), and insulting the meat (Lee 1993 [1984]) have become among many illustrious examples of the phenomenon. One particularly intriguing result of these studies is that much sharing occurs in one-way flows without material reciprocation in kind. Skilled or lucky hunters, for example, regularly have more food to give out than non-hunters or unskilled and unlucky hunters. Hunt (2000:20) argues that it is better to categorize this kind of resource allocation as a transfer. Unlike an exchange, a transfer does not have to be economic in the sense of balancing needs with limited resources. With transfer, food can pass through sets of partners, or networks of dyadic social relationships. What benefit does the producer of the food receive in exchange for transfers of food is an important issue that has become somewhat of a debate in some of the recent evolutionary ecology literature (Hawkes, 1993, 2001, 2002; Hill and Kaplan 1993; Gurven 2001; Sosis 2001; Bliege Bird and Bird 1997; Ingold 1996). Another related issue in anthropological food sharing research is how multiple modes or explanations for sharing link up with one another (e.g., Bodenhorn 2000; Fortier 2000, Hovelsrud-Broda 2000, Kishigami 2000, Kitanishi 2000, Wenzel 2000). This paper strives to address these issues and reports on food sharing data from north-central Siberia in light of recent anthropological research and modeling. Three overarching systems of distribution are examined: a) kinship cooperation, b) reciprocity, and c) producers, seekers, and circumstantialists. In my field research in Siberia I have given attention to both the attitudes and moral environment of the participants, as well as documented resource flow and social relationships of those involved in food sharing.

Post-Socialism in the Central Taimyr Lowlands

Social Moralities of Distribution

She is a single mother and a relative. If we have meat, we are not stingy when she asks for some. We always know that she doesn't have any meat. Natasha Chuprina, Ust Avam, 2001.

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:

The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

First, we give meat and fish to the old people, then we give to others who need it, and finally, we leave some for ourselves. This is our law. Vitaly Porotov, Dudinka, 2001.

Note, keeping meat for oneself (dlia sebia), a concept that include one's family and kin, is last on the distribution list behind elders and other people. In addition to Porotov's formulation, I have documented a number of traditional rules and viewpoints that justify and encourage food sharing with people beyond the family. For example:

If I get a caribou, I am obliged to give away some of the meat. I mean if I did not give some away, the hunt does not happen. It is that kind of nature. We share, if we catch game. Sergei Turdagin, Ust Avam 1997.

Traditional cosmological understandings may be a significant motivational force for food sharing in the community. While they are passed on from ancestors to descendants, these rules and obligations encourage cooperation among a wide set of individuals, and maintain egalitarianism in the community.

Kinship and Friendship in Native Siberian Communities

The social context in my study community is one where there is a relatively high density of genealogical and affinal relationships. For example, my earlier research found that the average number of genealogical relatives in the community was 35. That is to say that approximately 5 percent of the population is genealogically related to the average person. Affinal relatives increase the circles of kinship in the community to the point where many informants say, "Half the village are my relations."

Table 1 shows the answers to the question "What role do relatives play in your life?" The most popular roles for kin were: "help" (pomoshch) and "a big role" (bol'shaia rol'). Answers to this question can be divided into two sets: 1) socially expected behavior patterns of kin and 2) concepts about kinship, such as old/young, and close distant. This wide set of answers may be due to the openness of the question. Note that kinship and friendship concepts are not mutually exclusive according to the survey results. A number of Dolgan and Nganasan informants stated that the role of relatives was friendship.

Although I did not ask a similar question about friends, there is anecdotal evidence that the expectations for friends are likely to be more reciprocal than those for relatives. One good friend of mine suggested to me that a number of his supposed local friends had recently borrowed tools and not returned them, but rather, lent them to someone else. He recalled during the Soviet period he was not quite so concerned about such behavior, because tools were available in the store. Now in the post-Soviet period, when access to resources has diminished, failure to reciprocate is likely to more easily end a friendship. This points to the greater conditionality of friendship over kinship.

Study 1: Sharing of Unprocessed Country Food

I will now discuss the design and the results of three studies that I have done on food sharing in the Siberian arctic. The first study was part of structured interviews of 79 household heads in the Ust Avam community in 1997. These households represented approximately one half of those in the study community. Two questions were related to food sharing. One question was "To whom do you give meat and fish?" This was an open-ended question and the answers are shown in rank order in Table 2. The answers to the first question indicate that relatives are the most common recipients of meat and fish, followed by friends and other people, such as pensioners, single mothers and other people who ask. Neighbors are less common recipients.

Informants were also asked the question, "From where, or from whom, do you get meat and fish?" About half of the informants replied that they got meat and fish only from the tundra (i.e., through their own efforts). This points to the local importance of subsistence hunting, fishing, and trapping for family livelihood. The other half replied that they got meat and fish gifts from relatives and friends, either alone, or in combination with their own foraging and purchasing. Twenty five percent of the respondents mentioned purchasing as the main source (5%) or supplemental source (20%). Similarly, the second question showed that beyond their own subsistence efforts, relatives, friends, and purchases were strategies used to obtain the most important components of the diet. It should be noted that virtually all meat and fish was purchased prior to 1991. Hunters were obliged to turn in the products to state enterprises and keeping products for ones own use, barter, or sale was punishable.

While these questions do not test the relative importance of one modes of distribution over another for a given type of social relationship, the results do indicate the level of local emic importance of kinship in food sharing and transfers. People who cannot support themselves are taken care of, and exactly at the levels as expected from the "law of sharing" as Vitaly formulated above, where they would be the second most popular receivers of food. The results of Study 1 show that kin are receiving more food than unrelated village elders in general, however, where according to Vitaly's law of sharing, they should be given food first. How food is actually distributed helps to resolve this contradiction. Young hunters often bring meat and fish catches directly to their parents, elder sisters, or wives. Many kin recipients of food are in fact elders.

 The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

Study 2: Sharing of Meals

In the second study a rigorous test of food sharing models in the Dolgan and Nganasan subsistence economy is possible. The study focused on food sharing at meals, using records of meals I collected during my dissertation research. Meals are potentially important to the food-sharing debate for a number of reasons. First, foods consumed at meals include the value added to the product during preparation. The additional value originates from the time and labor invested in processing and cooking, as well as any supplemental foods that enhance taste. Thus, giving away a valued-added product increases the costs of transfer over unprepared foods. From a cost-benefit standpoint, one would expect the benefits received to be greater than those received upon transfer of equal amounts of unprepared food. Second, in the Dolgan and Nganasan study communities discussed here, the practice of visiting relatives and friends is an important part of daily life, being one of the main social activities. Hosts are invariably hospitable, and food is almost always served to guests. If this reciprocal sharing at meals is occurring often enough, inter-household food sharing at meals may be a significant venue for risk-buffering exchange. Third, in the daily life of hunter-gatherers, production, distribution, and consumption are interrelated components of the socio-behavioral continuum. Depending on division of labor in society, inter-household sharing at meals may turn out to be more important than previously thought, especially if sharing at meals is a form of return payment for earlier transfers of unprepared food, other kinds of assistance, or a venue for information sharing about who has what food.

In this analysis I grouped meals into three types of locations (bush, village, city) and compared the relative proportion of different kinds of social relationships characterizing the participants in the meals. I selected 814 meals from the 1995/1996 field season. Within this data were 546 shared meals, 303 of which were interhousehold meals. The other 268 meals were shared only between members within one household. In the interhousehold meals members of 50 households observed as hosts or guests. Most observations were made in 3 households, multiple observations in 15 households, single observations in 9 more households. Households were defined by coresidence in a village apartment or hunting cabin based on my reading of the village registry book and my community census. In a number of cases husbands are listed in the registry book as the sole member of a separate household so the family can receive single-mother payments. Thus, coresidence was used to define a household. This definition could be problematic in some respects, since Soviet housing policy focused on nuclear families and small apartments. One might find extended families, which have people living in a number of apartments in the village, plus regularly living in a hunting area, but where people coordinate their activities to some extent. However, by using a consistent definition of the household, which has been imposed by the living conditions of the village, one can make an initial appraisal of food sharing behavior. Alternative definitions of "household" would likely result in different outcomes.

At meals in the bush (hunting trips, etc.) participants are most commonly close agnatic kin. Relatively high proportions of spouses, affines, and friends of both sexes characterized village meals, while higher proportions of females and their cognatic relatives and friends characterize city meals. These differences indicate a flexible social organization that has adapted to the social and political context of the Soviet North. The village has become in effect a permanent meeting spot, where cooperation between individuals from different households is likely reflected in shared meal. The bush reflects the importance of kinship cooperation in hunting. The city reflects the trend for female migration to the city and reliance of people living in villages upon relatives in the city for a base while on visits.

Developing a technique to compare kinship and reciprocal meal hosting was the next step. Multidimensional scaling represents the differences between each actor, in this case households a, b, c, e, y, and v, the six with the highest number of interhousehold partners in the dataset. On the left graph in Figure 1, I used the average household relatedness of each cooperating household based on the individual genealogical relatedness of each pair of individuals in each household. Non-related people in the household, such as spouses without children, lower average household relatedness and create more distance in the graph. In the graph on the right, the same six households are compared in terms of the numbers of meals hosted versus the number of meals in which they were guests for each of the five other households. The distance between the points indicates the degree of dissimilarity between each household in term of interhousehold meal sharing. Kinship (left) and reciprocal meal hosting (right) appear to be structured similarly. Does this lead me to the proposition that Gurven et al. (2002) make (i.e., much of what was assumed to be kin-selected behavior in humans may actually be reciprocal altruism)? One might as easily argue the other way, much of what we thought of as reciprocal altruism may be kinship.

The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

A social network approach to resource flow and reciprocity reveals more information than a multidimensional scale. The position of households determined by their similarity to each other with regard the households with whom they share meals as above. The size of the arrow indicates the relative number of observations of Household B eating at Household A.

The network in Figure 2 is sparse. Only about 10 percent of possible ties are present. Of the two most observed households, they have 15 and 16 sharing households respectively. The network shows a well-connected core, where most of the households can reach other people in three steps on average. The periphery, represented by blue points, is where households are connected to most others by four to six steps.

Another characteristic of the network is inequality. Many actors are more active as hosts than others. This may be an artifact of the way the data were collected-focal following of members of households A, B, C, D, and E. Nevertheless, the graph represents a fairly complete picture of the interhousehold meal events of those households over a year.

The next figure identifies the cases where there are reciprocal ties, and indicates their relative strength by the thickness of the line. The network is characterized by little reciprocity (Figure 3). Reciprocity is present between households where relationship is characterized by high levels of kin relatedness and also between households where there is little or no kin relatedness. In these cases the relationship would be characterized by friendship.

In summary, households with close kinship links have the most assymetrical hosting of meals by elder generation. This might be expected based on kinship theory, where the lion's share of resources flow from ancestors to descendants, especially those in infancy, youth, and young adulthood. Reciprocity meal hosting occurs, but reciprocity is not necessary for meals between relatively close kin in different household-an example is household A (the elderly parents) and D (the young couple with newborn child). Reciprocal meal hosting appears to be important for members of different households, unrelated by kinship. Thus, six of the seven households with whom household E reciprocally shared meals are friends of household E and only one is related through close kinship. Representatives of many households who are linked neither through kinship or reciprocity are also hosted at meals. These are the peripheral households portrayed with blue dots. Thus, evidence for social leveling through food sharing at meals is provided. These patterns still need to be checked with patterns of actual kinship relatedness and patterns of economic need, for which similar graphs can be generated, in order to check the importance of each of these variables in food sharing networks.

 The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

Study 3: Identifying Variables and their Significance in Food Sharing

The research I conducted in the second half of 2001 focused on distribution of meat and fish following procurement. The idea with this study was to collect quantitative or quantifiable data that could be also used in a multivariate model of food sharing. Discovering the relative strength of a number of variables in explaining food sharing, and discovering whether one model acts as a filter on the others could add substantially to the anthropology of food sharing. For example, kinship might increase the amounts of meat that would be shared through other modes. Food sharing and distribution information was collected using four techniques in 2001: hunter surveys, economic diaries, rank-order interviews, and open-ended interviews. I have not yet completed the analysis, but I can discuss some preliminary impressions.

A commonly cited reason for sharing with relatives is because they are relatives. Many stated that they give to relatives because they get "pleasure" (udovolstvia). This emotional result is significant for theory of kinship emotions.
Another reason stated is that the relatives needed something to cook, implying that they had a right to the food. This points to the embeddedness of the ownership principle in kinship networks and concepts.
Reciprocity between friends and immediate sharing after the hunt appear to supplement distribution of meat and fish through kinship networks.
Hunters and families who shared food with friends often stated that they shared because they "hosted or treated" (ugostili) the other person. The fact that they are treating implies some degree of generosity, and while not an explicit condition of the transfer, a return treat would be hoped for in the future.
Friends frequently accompanied one another on foraging trips in the Avam tundra and the meat or fish was often split upon completion of the task, usually into similar portions. Many times friends will contribute different necessary items for a foraging trip: One person contributes the motor, the other gives gasoline. One person has a gun, the other ammunition.
Food is provided to nonrelatives and nonfriends without expectations of return gifts, following the producer, seeker , and circumstantialist model assumption.
The receivers of public goods do not necessarily become friends as the primary relationship to the giver.
Many hunter give meat to someone who is persistently asking for it. This is the technique described by Peterson (1993) for Australian aborigines as demand sharing. Such gifts conform to traditional prescriptions for sharing meat and fish with anyone who needs it.
The stated reasons for sharing with kin, friends, and nonrelatives and nonfriends is because they asked (oni poprosili). This goes along with the traditional prescription "Give it, if you have it" which may serve as a motivational component that works as a leveling mechanism.

Theoretical Implications

Evolutionary ecological investigations of the topic among hunter-gatherers have generally focused on primary distributions of the products of hunting, most particularly transfers of meat from hunters to people in other households. The transfer of apparently valuable food resources to people, who pay little or none of the costs of acquisition, prompts the questions of the transfer's benefits to the hunter (Blurton Jones 1987, Hawkes 1993). At least six models have been proposed to describe the mechanisms and conditions that favor resource transfer and sharing among human foragers (Winterhalder's models of circumstance 1997, 2001): 1) tolerated theft; 2) producing, scrounging, opportunism; 3) risk-sensitive subsistence; 4) by-product cooperation; 5) trade/exchange; 6) show-off; and 7) kin selection. Generally, these hypotheses focus on material, reproductive, or social costs and benefits of resource transfer. In this paper, I have grouped these models into three underlying sets of models. Kinship cooperation in food sharing has been minimized in recent literature. The claim is that big game hunting does not make sense economically in provisioning. Does provisioning equate with kinship? I have argued that it does not. Kinship includes the collateral relatives and their descendants, as well as affines, who are the ancestors of common co-descendants (Hamilton 1964, 1975; Jones 2000; Sober and Wilson 1998). When seen in an expanded light, kinship can encompass relationships with significant proportions of contemporary hunting-and-gathering communities such as Ust Avam.

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.

The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

A difficulty with the show-off argument is the question of whether the signal production is the function of an adaptation for hunting large game or a by-product of some other adaptation, such as ambition, status striving, or social endeavoring. What specifically is the show-off adaptation? Adaptation is an onerous concept, and should be used only when there is clear evidence of design (Williams 1966). A distinction of levels of analysis is helpful here. The proximate level of explanation deals with how an adaptation works in individuals. Proximate-level causation "concerns the direct mechanisms that bring something about. It is a structural description of the individual as a 'behaving machine"" (Daly and Wilson 1983:15). With the show-off hypothesis, one would have to show how reputation building is related motivationally to big-game hunting, and not warriorship or oratory skills, or some other social definition of success (unless big-game hunting could be shown to be a part of cultural complex that included warriorship and oration). Second, and closely related to proximate function is the developmental form and context of traits. Ontogeny refers to individual experience and development. Ontogenetic or developmental explanations concern changes over life-times (Daly and Wilson 1983). Social relations important throughout an individual's life change with the dynamics of changing somatic and reproductive interests (Alexander 1987, Daly and Wilson 1983). Social and environmental developmental factors are relevant here. For example, maybe hunting small game is more the providence of individuals, the less skilled, or women and children, while big game hunting is more of a cooperative adult activity.

What caused the evolution of this apparently costly behavior, documented in contemporary societies? Ultimate-level explanations deal with the evolutionary conditions or reasons for the natural selection of a phenotypic trait, such as the male peacock's tail. According to Daly and Wilson (1983:15), ultimate-level explanation concerns the adaptive significance of the trait, its "selective consequences, which must ultimately entail reproductive consequences." For natural selection to operate on a trait on the ultimate level, "the behaviour must not only have consequences for reproduction but also be a consequence of the elements that are reproduced (Ingold 1996:30, his italics). This last point is what is not clear with the show-off hypothesis.

Social striving through food sharing is something that is widely downplayed in hunting and gathering societies, and differentiation is discouraged in peasant communities and egalitarian communes. What actual social goals prevailed in the evolutionary past most likely varied a lot. The show-off model has difficulty explaining food sharing where the proximate goal is the satisfaction of taking care of people in local communities (Bodenhorn 2000), and the strategic manipulation of the flow of resources for provisioning (Kitanishi 2000). The main characteristic of food sharing that has been emphasized is the transfer of resources to free riders, who put social pressure on hunters to give it. "Only after division and distribution when he controls a share himself could he exchange it for something else. Like anyone else, he can only trade or exchange the portion this is his private property." (Hawkes 2001: 224).

Comparison is an important means of testing phylogenetic explanations. The show-off story starts from hypothetical conditions of marginal value of defense of resources, as modeled in the producers, seekers, and circumstantialist game. Comparing reports of demand sharing and tolerated theft among contemporary hunter-gatherers with, distributive processes among chimpanzees and other species (capuchins, for example Wilkinson 1988), an homology of distribution with two phases is identified: 1) multiple claims on common source of meat, and (2) individual control of shares with transfer, respectively (Hawkes 2001:225). The main difference for humans is the obtainable prey size, which allows more shares to be claimed. In the show-off hypothesis, hunters start off minimizing costs of defense by providing to free riders. Continuing this phylogentic hypothesis forward, after languages evolve, selection favors advertisement of male quality. Show-off hunters develop reputations and become reliable allies and mates. In effect, this argument is a combination of the producers, seekers, and circumstantialists model with the reciprocity model, where a benefit to the hunter is status and reproductive success. The argument also combines phylogenetic hypotheses with proximate-level decision-making (cost/benefit of advertising). The show-off literature may actually best be understood as a discussion on the level of phylogeny rather than adaptive function. The phylogenetic level of explanation deals with the history of a trait through evolutionary time. According to Daly's and Wilson's usage (1983:16), a phylogenetic explanation is "an account of the evolutionary progression by which the behavior (or the proximate causal structure underlying it) has been formed out of some preexisting organization." The description is one that focuses on forms, whereas, the ultimate explanation focuses on function of a trait over an evolutionary time-scale.

The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

The show-off/costly signaling hypothesis for food sharing of big game may not provide the specificity of mechanism that would qualify it as an adaptation. Underlying the provision of free riders is an economic decision based on the costs of defense of resources. Underlying costly signaling is a form of indirect reciprocity (Nowak and Sigmund 1998). There are likely to be a whole host of adaptive mechanisms involved in big-game hunting and food sharing, including volition to be influenced by others, nepotism, striving for success, improving tools, as well as abilities to calculate economic costs and benefits.

This points to another problem in the evolutionary ecological literature on food sharing: the relationship between the definitions of property and hypotheses of food transfer. The definition of ownership in the show-off hypothesis, one based on right of exclusive use and the right to voluntarily transfer their ownership to someone else, is a standard definition of ownership in economics. The key is the ability to exclude others access to resources, but even those using this definition admit that exclusion is a continuum (Ostrom 1990:31, Hawkes 1991:220, 1993).

Units of big game meat are highly subtractable, but they are not an open-access commons. For example, the butcher of largest prey, whales among the Inupiaq of northern Alaska, is carefully organized (Bodenhorn 2000:35). These products would not be public goods according to the accepted definition, but common-pool resources, and thus, owned by the community of individuals providing them. The process of "designing, implementing, and enforcing a set of rules to coordinate activities is equivalent to the provision of a local collective good." (Ostrom 1990:33). Community implies social relationships. Ownership is defined in terms of relationships between people (Hann 1998), rather than possession.

In another phylogenetic argument that contrasts with the show-off hypothesis, Ichikawa (n.d.), has argued that humans have two unique institutional inventions in comparison with non-human primates (NHP). The first is property, implying the remote control of ownership; and the second is the hunting-sharing complex. For NHP, alteregos recognize ownership of an object ego holds or keeps in immediate proximity. The ability to keep an object in proximity, or to maintain control over territory for that matter, is modeled in this case as a marginal value curve of the benefits of defense (cf. Dyson-Hudson and Smith 1978; Hawkes 2001:220). Moreover, human institutions extend ownership beyond individual proximate possession, whereby the owner of an item can be separated from the one who actually uses and carries it-ownership is recognized nonetheless, and if something is procured with a hunting net, for example, the owner gets a portion. Lending out hunting tools, such as hunting nets among the Mbuti (Ichikawa n.d.), or hunting implements, fuel, or support equipment among the Inuit (Bodenhorn 2000) is reported over a diverse set of hunting and gathering societies. I observed this among the Dolgan and Nganasan in northern Siberia. The result, according to Ichigawa, is role differentiation and cooperation between those who actively perform hunting and the people, who provide them with the tools, generally the elderly or experienced. One might classify this kind of cooperation as reciprocal attitudes that foster exchange across services. Among the Mbuti, for example, visitors are of course given food, but more the hospitable treatment is to provide guests with nets and a chance to hunt together (Ichikawa n.d.). Similarly, among the Dolgan and Nganasan, fishing nets, shotguns, spare parts for snowmobiles and boat motors, opportunities to hunt or fish is considered the most hospitable treatment. Opportunities to hunt are part of the by-product mutualism model for cooperation, also a type of reciprocity. By-product mutualism differs from reciprocal altruism in the strict sense that the immediate structure of the situation provides no temptation or opportunity to cheat.

In Ichigawa's hunting-sharing complex, valued food, such as meat, is always shared carefully, and in many cases, it is closely linked with existing and/or potential social or inter-individual relationships. For the Mbuti: 1) First distribution occurs among those who either directly or indirectly participated in the hunt; it is obligatory and clearly defined. 2) Second distribution occurs in an informal way and includes those who do not receive meat in the first distribution. 3) Third distribution occurs after women cook the food and distribute it again along with vegetable food to members of her household and others. This includes female contribution to diet. The moral system among the Mbuti is one that prevents other non-relevant individuals from approaching to the butchering and sharing site: "They avert their eyes from the one who is not expected to participate in the distribution. Such a slight sign is enough to inform the intention of the owner." (Ichikawa, n.d.).

Ichikawa asks why owners exist, rather than why men work. Ownership of food is nominal, and owner may be thanked but does not earn prestige. Rather, ownership allows individuals in the social group to recognize and manipulate social relationships and achieve social goals, such as cooperation and conflict resolution. There is good reason to believe that this is a condition that existed in the human evolutionary past.

Likewise, Kitanishi (2000) describes the social importance of these three types of distributions for the Aka:

"Because of the difference in the extent of personal discretion between second and third levels of distribution, the second level results in sharing with a wider extent and the third level in sharing with a narrower extent. The co-existence of these two kinds of sharing, especially among the Aka, assures the balance of socio-economic relationships with close persons and with those not so close" (Kitanishi 2000: 165).

Based on my observations of food sharing among the Dolgan and Nganasan, one could also place the non-market distribution of locally procured meat and fish into three phases or categories. The first distribution is immediately at the procurement site among hunters and/or among those who have participated in the hunt in some way. This distribution is considered more obligatory. The second distribution usually occurs upon returning to the community, where most, or all, of the kill is transferred to the wife, sister, or parents of the hunter. Additional transfers are made to other people who need it or ask for it during this phase. The third distribution phase occurs during consumption where interhousehold visiting is a common and integral part of daily life.

Summary

Because of the highly egalitarian nature of Dolgan and Nganasan social relations, transfers of food do not necessarily create or reinforce a hierarchical social relationship. Although good hunters are highly respected in matters of the tundra, they do not appear to wield authority in village politics. While the impetus for sharing may often come from the potential recipient, requests are not considered begging because the recipient is claiming a right in the distribution. Being a native person of that locality is oftentimes sufficient for such a claim, and showing respect to the tundra by sharing the catch, as mentioned above by the hunter Sergei, helps to create value and perpetuate the institutionThe parallels between the Dolgand and Nganasan, and some tropical foragers in this regard are stunning. . If the person is an able-bodied adult male, however, requests for food may be questioned.

Friends are mentioned as frequent receivers of gifts of meat and fish. In most cases, there is an expectation that the recipient will do something at sometime in the future, if needed. This is a loose definition of reciprocity, and there may be emotional benefits for keeping friends or choosing friends for hunting partners, even if friends do not return equal portions of gifts in kind, contribute other material prerequisites to hunting, or participate in the hunting or fishing.

However, most of the time friends do these things or make attempts to do so. Kin seem to be the recipients of the lion's share of transferred bush food in the Avam tundra. The emotional benefits of sharing with kin among the Dolgan and Nganasan are often cited. The emotional benefit is a motivating force consistent with what would be expected from kinship theory, even if gifts are not linearly correlated with genealogical distance at present. Food sharing in the Siberian Arctic represents likely universal strategies of kinship cooperation, friendship, and community well being, now becoming increasingly important, as the formal economy in the Russian north has shrunk.

The Food Sharing Debate: A Case Study from Siberia

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michael Schnegg, University of Cologne, for assistance with the social network analysis. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation's Arctic Social Science Program (OPP 9528936), a research fellowship from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of State, Program for Scientific Research in Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe (Title VIII), and a research grant from the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR). The Leakey Foundation sponsored the analysis of the data for this article. I prepared the article while I was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Leakey Foundation, any of the other funding agencies, or the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.