Towards a Broader View of Hunter-Gatherer Sharing

Towards a Broader View of Hunter-Gatherer Sharing

Edited by Noa Lavi & David E. Friesem

The practice of sharing food among hunting and gathering societies has attracted significant scholarly attention from anthropological, evolutionary and archaeological perspectives. This edited monograph offers to broaden the view of the practice of sharing to include sharing of space, actions, land, knowledge, time, self and identity. The chapters in this book present ethnographic, archaeological and theoretical cases from different periods of time, diverse communities and environments across the world to demonstrate how perceptions, values and mechanics previously assigned to food sharing, are applied to other tangible and intangible forms of sharing. The cross-disciplinary integration between archaeologists and biological and social anthropologists expands the understanding of what is socially required for sharing, how it is practiced and experienced, what it allows and what are its social and evolutionary implications. The new concepts and understandings of sharing that emerge from this book provide a multi-layered framework which can be applied in various contexts aiding in unravelling new intangible aspects of this core social practice. This monograph raises an insightful and timely discussion about the evolution and social complexity of non-agrarian societies in general and provides new tools and ideas to explore the complexity and diversity in the social world of past and contemporary societies.

• Complete volume - Towards a Broader View of Hunter-Gatherer Sharing
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Where have all the kin gone? On hunter-gatherers’ sharing, kinship and scale
• Chapter 2 - Extending and limiting selves: a processual theory of sharing
• Chapter 3 - Intimate living: sharing space among Aka and other hunter-gatherers
• Chapter 4 - Sharing and inclusion: generosity, trust and response to vulnerability in the distant past
• Chapter 5 - The demand for closeness: social incentives for sharing among hunter-gatherers and other groups
• Chapter 6 - An ethnoarchaeological view on hunter-gatherer sharing and its archaeological implications for the use of social space
• Chapter 7 - Sharing pleasures to share rare things: hunter-gatherers’ dual distribution systems in Africa
• Chapter 8 - The archaeology of sharing immaterial things: social gatherings and the making of collective identities amongst Eastern Saharan last hunter-gatherer groups
• Chapter 9 - Information sharing in times of scarcity: an ethnographic and archaeological examination of drought strategies in the Kalahari Desert and the central plains of North America
• Chapter 10 - Studying sharing from the archaeological record: problems and potential of scale
• Chapter 11 - An elephant to share: rethinking the origins of meat and fat sharing in Palaeolithic societies
• Chapter 12 - Identifying variation in cultural models of resource sharing between hunter-gatherers and farmers: a multi-method, cognitive approach
• Chapter 13 - Foragers with limited shared knowledge
• Chapter 14 - The sharing of lithic technological knowledge
• Chapter 15 - Men hunt, women share: gender and contemporary Inuit subsistence relations
• Chapter 16 - The pure hunter is the poor hunter?
• Chapter 17 - Ecological, historical and social explanations for low rates of food sharing among Mikea foragers of southwest Madagascar