Empirical data on food sharing in native Dolgan, Nganasan, and Nenets communities in Siberia provide evidence for hunter control over big game and fish, as well as likely benefits of inter-household sharing. Most food sharing occurs with kin and, thus, kin-selection-based nepotism cannot be ruled out. Reciprocal inter-household sharing at meals occurs less often. Social context is discussed

Ziker, John

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Boise State UniversityScholarWorksAnthropology Faculty Publications andPresentations Department of Anthropology1-1-2004Nonmarket Cooperation in the Indigenous FoodEconomy of Taimyr, Arctic Russia: Evidence forControl and BenefitJohn ZikerBoise State UniversityThis document was originally published by Cambridge University Press in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Copyright restrictions may apply. DOI:10.1017/S0140525X04340124ACKNOWLEDGMENTSAvishag Zahavi has been a partner to the development of the text andNaama Zahavi-Ely improved its presentation.Nonmarket cooperation in the indigenousfood economy of Taimyr, Arctic Russia:Evidence for control and benefitJohn ZikerDepartment of Anthropology, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83702-1950.jziker@boisestate.eduAbstract: Empirical data on food sharing in native Dolgan, Nganasan, andNenets communities in Siberia provide evidence for hunter control overbig game and fish, as well as likely benefits of inter-household sharing.Most food sharing occurs with kin and, thus, kin-selection-based nepotismcannot be ruled out. Reciprocal interhousehold sharing at meals occursless often. Social context is discussed.After describing four evolutionary hypotheses on hunter-gathererfood sharing, Gurven presents four key latent variables useful asindicators for evaluating nonmarket food transfer documented inethnographic settings: depth, breadth, equality, and balance. Spe-cific combinations of values for these variables as predictions forthe explanatory models make the article a valuable contributionfor those collecting field data on food sharing in the human-be-havioral-ecology framework. Potential complications include: thespecific combination of strategies characterizing food transferbased on given relationships in an ego’s social network, the stageof food distribution, the type of resource being procured, the po-sition in the life cycle, and local definitions of success.Empirical research on food sharing among Dolgan andNganasan in the Taimyr Autonomous Region in the Siberian Arc-tic shows the influence of a number of variables and models de-pending on the social context. For example, in the 1995-to-1996period, 814 food-consumption events were observed in threetypes of locations in everyday settings. Of these meals, 546 casesincluded two or more native participants. In the regional capital,Dudinka, the majority of dyadic relationships at shared mealscomprised mostly cognatic relatives, along with some friends. Themajority of participants were female. In remote communities, in-cluding Ust’-Avam, Tukhard, and Kresty-Taimyrskii, cognaticdyads were less common but spouse and affine dyads had higherfrequencies at shared meals. In most cases, affines represented avisiting household. During hunting trips, at reindeer herdingcamps, and at remote houses in the tundra, males who are closecognatic relatives and friends were the predominant participantsat meals. The village and bush were the contexts under whichmore interhousehold food sharing occurred.A thorough analysis of food sharing for five households in theUst’-Avam area resulted in an interconnected network of 50 house-holds. Seventeen households were considered to constitute thecore because the elimination of one dyadic household link withinthis group would not isolate any of the other households. The re-maining 33 households were peripheral actors, often connectedthrough one link only. Focusing on household dyads, just over halfwere households related by kinship (44 of 84). Households relatedby cognatic kinship were associated with the majority (331) of in-terhousehold-meal observations (total 439) in Ust’-Avam andnearby bush. Following predictions from inclusive-fitness theory(Hamilton 1964) and generalized-reciprocity theory (Sahlins1972), resource flow in this sample was most asymmetrical amongpairs of households related by close kinship. This asymmetry in-cludes household relationships exhibiting one-way flows of re-sources, especially from households with high producer-to-con-sumer ratios to households exhibiting lower consumer-to-producerratios (i.e., young families). The context of much of this inter-household sharing is one of children visiting and eating at theirgrandparents’ or aunt’s and uncle’s house, providing further sup-port for inclusive-fitness benefit.Although non-kin also received meals in a one-way flow, suchsharing relationships were less common – one household, con-sisting of an unrelated friend from outside the village, was hostedthroughout her one-week visit; in another case, a young appren-tice was hosted throughout a hunting expedition. Resource flowwas more symmetrical, on average, between unrelated house-holds, following expectations for reciprocal altruism and balancedreciprocity. Meals hosted between non-relatives show more bal-ance. Meals hosted with kin show depth and bias towards relativeswith children.In a recent study, a number of independent variables were re-gressed on the interhousehold food-sharing network (Ziker,n.d.). The presence or absence of a kinship link between house-holds was the most consistent predictor of interhousehold foodsharing at meals. The physical proximity of households to one an-other is a marginal and weak explanatory variable, which dropsout of significance when other variables are added. Becausehousing was assigned to families as it was built and became avail-able in the 1970s through early 1990s in Taimyr villages, relativeswere rarely assigned living quarters in close proximity. Kinshipstrongly influences food-sharing patterns independent of house-hold location.Reciprocal food-sharing relationships comprised 26 of the 84household dyads (11 pairs of households in the core and 2 pairs ofcore-periphery households). When rank-order average householdrelatedness was compared to the rank of meals exchanged, thePearson correlation (0.663) was significant (p  0.014; two-tailed).Genealogical relatedness structures reciprocity, and the unrelatedhousehold dyads (3 of 13 pairs) received small total percentagesof food shared at meals. The depth of sharing with relatives (andthe asymmetry in the direction of young households) is highlyevocative of kin selection-based nepotism.Local social definitions of cultural success and proper behav-ior are also important for understanding food-sharing patternsamong Dolgan and Nganasan. Hunters generally transfer the ma-jority of procured meat and fish to their elders or spouses uponreturning to the village, which implies a high degree of controlover resources but a conversion to family property (Ziker 2002a).The elders or spouses (many of whom are the keepers of keys tostorage areas) redistribute the raw food to their close relatives,especially those with children, as well as to friends and acquain-tances in the form of either raw food or meals. Hunters and theirfamilies give to those people who ask for food (especially singlemothers and pensioners), but they usually give relatively smallportions of raw food and host such people at meals more rarelythan relatives.Although control is exerted at the kill and upon returning to thevillage, local understandings of property require hunters or theirrelative to share some portions of the catch with other people (oth-erwise “the hunt simply would not happen”). In cooperative huntsor fishing, the catch is usually divided equally among the partici-pants. Signalling through food sharing likely factors into estab-lishing long-term cooperative relationships with non-kin. Foodsharing with kin may also carry a signalling function in terms of re-spect for elders and caring for relatives, who are supplied withfood without asking. This is not to say that food sharing creates kinper se but that hypothetical signalling effects should not be lim-ited to mating effort and long-term social-relationship buildingoutside of kin. It is not clear that consistently generous individu-als receive prestige, support, or social insurance beyond kin andclose friends. Although claims of stinginess could carry a socialcost reducing the benefit of hunter control, such communicationis reserved for cases where the social relationship has alreadysoured.Commentary/Gurven: To give and to give not: The behavioral ecology of human food transfersBEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2004) 27:4 571

Nonmarket Cooperation in the Indigenous Food Economy of Taimyr, Arctic Russia: Evidence for Control and Benefit

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Nonmarket Cooperation in the Indigenous Food Economy of Taimyr, Arctic Russia: Evidence for Control and Benefit

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