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Food-Sharing Networks in Lamalera, Indonesia

Reciprocity, Kinship, and Distance

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Abstract

Exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) is used here to test hypotheses derived from human behavioral ecology about the adaptive nature of human food sharing. Respondents in all (n = 317) households in the fishing and sea-hunting village of Lamalera, Indonesia, were asked to name those households to whom they had more frequently given (and from whom they had more frequently received) food during the preceding sea-hunting season. The responses were used to construct a social network of between-household food-sharing relationships in the village. The results show that kinship, proximity, and reciprocal sharing all strongly increase the probability of giving food to a household. The effects of kinship and distance are relatively independent of each other, although reciprocity is more common among residentially and genealogically close households. The results show support for reciprocal altruism as a motivation for food sharing, while kinship and distance appear to be important partner-choice criteria.

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Notes

  1. Brian Wood and Frank Marlowe, “Where do men’s foods go? The sharing and eating of male-acquired foods among the Hadza.” Unpublished manuscript.

  2. I address the effects of household-level covariates and tests of the costly signaling hypothesis in a forthcoming publication (in preparation).

  3. These numbers exclude three priests and their housekeeper as well as 18 students from other villages housed at the junior high school. Also excluded are the two outlying agricultural dusun of Lamamanu and Krokowolor. These are incorporated under the administration of Lamalera A and B, respectively, but are not themselves part of Lamalera historically considered (Barnes 1996).

  4. Indonesia is not a signatory to the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (International Whaling Commission 2007), though Lamalera would almost certainly qualify for a subsistence exemption if Indonesia were to sign. Sperm whales are categorized as “vulnerable,” the lowest of the “threatened” categories on the IUCN Red List (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources; Taylor et al. 2009). Recent estimates of the global sperm whale population place the number around 360,000 (Whitehead 2003). Lamaleran subsistence whale hunting poses no conservation risk to global sperm whale populations. Other cetacean species hunted in Lamalera are of even lower conservation concern on the IUCN Red List or are currently unclassified.

  5. Sperm whales were rarely seen, and none were caught during the study period, though one particularly large specimen was caught just before the study began and cured whale meat was in circulation throughout the study period.

  6. Meat and fish account for 73% of foods transferred by frequency; vegetal foods account for 27%. In addition to direct transfers to other households, food is shared in other ways, most commonly by contributing to or participating in communal meals associated with marriage and death rites or boat ceremonies. These modes of sharing occur less frequently and are not addressed here. See Nolin 2008.

  7. For example, both husband’s and wife’s kinship have independent and positive effects on sharing (Nolin 2008: Table 6.5).

  8. In pretesting, use of preprinted forms was found to bias the number of nominations toward the number of lines printed on the forms.

  9. The preferred method of capturing variation in sharing frequency was to ask respondents to rank the households they named in order of sharing frequency. However, in pretesting this method respondents were reluctant to provide rank-orderings. The common explanation offered was that “people give as they are able,” and that how often one received from or gave to others depended primarily on the success of the fishery.

  10. These totals include 93 giving and 66 receiving ties mistakenly omitted from previous analyses (cf. Nolin 2008:153).

  11. Characteristics of out-of-network ties are presented in Nolin 2008, Tables 5.1 and 5.2.

  12. Since every giving relationship is also a receiving relationship, mean outdegree and indegree must by definition be equal. Both are calculated as total ties divided by total households, or 3,111/317 = 9.81.

  13. Networks composed of valued ties can be binarized for use with ERGM, but this entails a loss of statistical information.

  14. A special volume of the Journal of Statistical Software (Vol. 24, 2008) on statnet provides an excellent introduction.

  15. Mutuality, indicating reciprocity in binary directed networks (Wasserman and Faust 1994), should not be confused with mutualism, a mode of cooperation itself plagued by a confusing proliferation of definitions (Brown 1983; Conner 1986; Maynard Smith 1983; Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). The similarity of the two terms in this context is unfortunate.

  16. The matrix Pearson correlation between kinship and distance is −0.075.

  17. One hundred networks were simulated using the coefficients from Table 2, Model EDK. ERGM models were then estimated on each of the simulated networks and their results averaged to produce the density-controlled residual deviance estimates reported.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the residents of Lamalera, Indonesia, for their patience, help, and hospitality, especially to my hosts, Y. B. Blikololong and family. I thank Michael Alvard, Steven Goodreau, Darryl Holman, Donna Leonetti, and Eric Smith for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Wesley Allen-Arave, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Jeremy Koster, Paul Leslie, and Mary Shenk for insightful discussions on this topic. Field research was conducted under the auspices of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), with the cooperation of research counterpart Dedi Adhuri. Field research was funded by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Award (BCS-0514559). Postdoctoral research was supported by a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Population Training Award (5T32 HD007168) to the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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    David A. Nolin

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Winner of the Evolutionary Anthropology Section’s Best Student Paper Award at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association

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Nolin, D.A. Food-Sharing Networks in Lamalera, Indonesia. Hum Nat 21, 243–268 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-010-9091-3

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