Abstract
Pastoralists rely on networks of cooperating households containing relatives and others to help with production and various other daily activities. To understand how socioecological differences and commonalities affect different social networks, we compared cooperative decision-making using gift games for 755 people working in herding groups across six sites in two countries (Saami areas in Norway and Tibetan areas in China). We found that members of the same herding group received more gifts from each other. Most variance in gift-giving between study sites was due to differences in the effects of relatedness. Tibetan herders were more likely than Saami herders to give gifts to closer relatives belonging to geographically distant herding groups. Also, stated reasons of giving gifts were different in the two societies: kin and wealth (measured by herd size) were more important among Tibetan pastoralists, while reciprocity was more important among Saami. Social ties within and beyond the family as well as the centrality of herding groups within social networks are general patterns of social organization favoring cooperation among pastoralists.
Significance statement
Pastoralists around the world have independently developed social institutions built around cooperative herding units, known as siidas in Norway and ru skor in China. Our study investigates how kin and non-kin, in the same herding group or belonging to other groups, are associated with cooperation. Our results show that communities in both countries exhibit similar social pattern in terms of who they chose to give gifts to, despite differences in socioeconomic status and culture. Most of the variance in cooperation occurred between sites, primarily due to the effect of kinship. Members of the same herding group were preferred recipients of gifts, regardless of kinship, although closer kin were more likely to receive gifts. The stated reasons for giving were different in the two sites: siidas prioritized reciprocity whereas ru skor preferred kin and less wealthy herders. We discuss that ecology should be taken into consideration in understanding social behaviors, even if under similar subsistence system.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
References
Aktipis A, Cronk L, Aguiar R (2011) Risk-pooling and herd survival: an agent-based model of a Maasai gift-giving system. Hum Ecol 39:131–140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9364-9
Allen B, Lippner G, Chen Y-T, Fotouhi B, Momeni N, Yau S-T, Nowak MA (2017) Evolutionary dynamics on any population structure. Nature 544:227–230. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21723
Anonymous (2016) Ressursregnskap for reindriftsnæringen. Norway: Reindriftsforvaltningen. 125 p. English title: Resource accounts for the reindeer industry.
Apicella CL, Marlowe FW, Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2012) Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers. Nature 481:497–501. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10736
Balliet D, Van Lange PAM (2013) Trust, punishment, and cooperation across 18 societies: a meta-analysis. Perspect Psychol Sci 8:363–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691613488533
Brent LJN (2015) Friends of friends: are indirect connections in social networks important to animal behaviour? Anim Behav 103:211–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.01.020
Buchan NR, Grimalda G, Wilson RK, Brewer M, Fatas E, Foddy M (2009) Globalization and human cooperation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106:4138–4142. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0809522106
Cao J-J, Yeh ET, Holden NM, Yang Y-Y, Du G-Z (2013) The effects of enclosures and land-use contracts on rangeland degradation on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. J Arid Environ 97:3–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2013.05.002
Chaudhary N, Salali GD, Thompson J, Dyble M, Page A, Smith D, Mace R, Migliano AB (2015) Polygyny without wealth: popularity in gift games predicts polygyny in BaYaka Pygmies. R Soc Open Sci 2:150054. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150054
Cronk L (2007) The influence of cultural framing on play in the trust game: a Maasai example. Evol Hum Behav 28:352–358. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.05.006
Csardi G, Nepusz T (2006) The igraph software package for complex network research. InterJournal. Complex Syst 1695. https://igraph.org. Accessed 3 July 2018
Du J, Mace R (2018) Parental investment in Tibetan populations does not reflect stated cultural norms. Behav Ecol 29:106–116. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arx134
Dyble M, Thompson J, Smith D, Salali GD, Chaudhary N, Page AE, Vinicuis L, Mace R, Migliano AB (2016) Networks of food sharing reveal the functional significance of multilevel sociality in two hunter-gatherer groups. Curr Biol 26:1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.064
Fletcher JA, Doebeli M (2009) A simple and general explanation for the evolution of altruism. Proc R Soc Lond B 276:13–19. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2008.0829
Fortunato S (2010) Community detection in graphs. Phys Rep 486:75–174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2009.11.002
Gelman A, Carlin JB, Stern HS, Rubin DB (2013) Bayesian data analysis, 3rd edn. Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton
Gerkey D (2013) Cooperation in context: public goods games and post-Soviet collectives in Kamchatka, Russia. Curr Anthropol 54:144–176. https://doi.org/10.1086/669856
Gervais MM (2017) RICH economic games for networked relationships and communities: development and preliminary validation in Yasawa, Fiji. Field Method 29:113–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X16643709
Glowacki L, Isakov A, Wrangham RW, McDermott R, Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2016) Formation of raiding parties for intergroup violence is mediated by social network structure. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 113:12114–12119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1610961113
Gurven M, Allen-Arave W, Hill K, Hurtado M (2000) “It’s a wonderful life”: signaling generosity among the Ache of Paraguay. Evol Hum Behav 21:263–282. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00032-5
Gurven M, Zanolini A, Schniter E (2008) Culture sometimes matters: intra-cultural variation in pro-social behavior among Tsimane Amerindians. J Econ Behav Organ 67:587–607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2007.09.005
Henrich J, Boyd R, Bowles S, Camerer C, Fehr E, Gintis H, McElreath R, Alvard M, Barr A, Ensminger J, Henrich NS, Hill K, Gil-White F, Gurven M, Marlowe FW, Patton JQ, Tracer D (2005) ‘Economic man’ in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behav Brain Sci 28:795–815; discussion 815–855. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X05000142
Herrmann B, Thöni C, Gächter S (2008) Antisocial punishment across societies. Science 319:1362–1367. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1153808
Honeychurch W, Makarewicz CA (2016) The archaeology of pastoral nomadism. Annu Rev Anthropol 45:341–359. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-095827
Lamba S, Mace R (2011) Demography and ecology drive variation in cooperation across human populations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:14426–14430. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1105186108
Leibbrandt A, Gneezy U, List JA (2013) Rise and fall of competitiveness in individualistic and collectivistic societies. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:9305–9308. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1300431110
Levine NE (2015) Transforming inequality: eastern Tibetan pastoralists from 1955 to the present. Nomad People 19:164–188. https://doi.org/10.3197/np.2015.190202
Mace R (1998) The coevolution of human fertility and wealth inheritance strategies. Phil Trans R Soc B 353:389–397. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1998.0217
Marlowe F (2004) Dictators and ultimatums in an egalitarian society of hunter–gatherers: the Hadza of Tanzani. In: Henrich J, Boyd R, Bowles S, Camerer C, Fehr E, Gintis H (eds) Foundations of human sociality: economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 168–193
McElreath R (2016) Statistical rethinking: a Bayesian course with examples in R and Stan. CRC Press, Boca Raton
Næss MW (2010) Contradictory evidence as a guide for future research: investigating the relationship between pastoral labour and production. Nomad People 14:51–71. https://doi.org/10.3167/np.2010.140104
Næss MW (2012) Cooperative pastoral production: reconceptualizing the relationship between pastoral labor and production. Am Anthropol 114:309–321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01427.x
Naess MW (2013) Climate change, risk management and the end of nomadic pastoralism. Int J Sustain Dev 20:123–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2013.779615
Næss MW (2016) Why do Tibetan pastoralists hunt? Land Use Policy 54:116–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.02.004
Næss MW (2017) Reindeer herding in a changing world—a comparative analysis. In: Kelman I (ed) Arcticness and change: power and voice from the north. UCL Press, London, pp 59–75
Næss MW, Bårdsen B-J, Fauchald P, Tveraa T (2010) Cooperative pastoral production—the importance of kinship. Evol Hum Behav 31:246–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.12.004
Newman MEJ (2006) Modularity and community structure in networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 103:8577–8582. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0601602103
Nietupski PK (2012) Labrang Monastery: a Tibetan Buddhist community on the Inner Asian Borderlands 1709–1958. Lexington Books, Plymouth
Nowak MA, May RM (1992) Evolutionary games and spatial chaos. Nature 359:826–829. https://doi.org/10.1038/359826a0
OECD (2017) Purchasing power parities (PPP) (indicator). https://doi.org/10.1787/1290ee5a-en. Accessed 13 Aug 2018
Page AE, Chaudhary N, Viguier S, Dyble M, Thompson J, Smith D, Salali GD, Mace R, Migliano AB (2017) Hunter-gatherer social networks and reproductive success. Sci Rep 7:1153. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01310-5
Paine R (1994) Herds of the tundra: a portrait of Saami reindeer pastoralism. Smithsonian Institution Press, London
Power EA (2016) Discerning devotion: Testing the signaling theory of religion. Evolution and Human Behavior 38(1):82–91
Prediger S, Vollan B, Frölich M (2011) The impact of culture and ecology on cooperation in a common-pool resource experiment. Ecol Econ 70:1599–1608. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.08.017
R Core Team (2012) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna
Roth EA (1996) Traditional pastoral strategies in a modern world: an example from Northern Kenya. Hum Organ 55:219–224. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.55.2.14465222904843v4
Ruffle BJ, Sosis R (2006) Cooperation and the in-group-out-group bias: a field test on Israeli kibbutz members and city residents. J Econ Behav Organ 60:147–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2004.07.007
Schielzeth H, Forstmeier W (2009) Conclusions beyond support: overconfident estimates in mixed models. Behav Ecol 20:416–420. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arn145
Silva AS, Mace R (2014) Cooperation and conflict: field experiments in Northern Ireland. Proc R Soc B 281:20141435. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1435
Smith D, Dyble M, Thompson J, Major K, Page AE, Chaudhary N, Salali GD, Vinicius L, Migliano AB, Mace R (2016) Camp stability predicts patterns of hunter-gatherer cooperation. R Soc Open Sci 3:160131. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160131
Smith D, Schlaepfer P, Major K, Dyble M, Page AE, Thompson J, Chaudhary N, Salali GD, Mace R, Astete L, Ngales M, Vinicius L, Migliano AB (2017) Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nat Commun 8:1853. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8
Thomas MG, Næss MW, Bårdsen B-J, Mace R (2015) Saami reindeer herders cooperate with social group members and genetic kin. Behav Ecol 26:1495–1501. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arv106
Thomas MG, Næss MW, Bårdsen B-J, Mace R (2016) Smaller Saami herding groups cooperate more in a public goods experiment. Hum Ecol 44(5):633–642. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-016-9848-3
Thomas MG, Ji T, Wu J-J, He Q-Q, Yi T, Mace R (2018) Kinship underlies costly cooperation in Mosuo villages. R Soc Open Sci 5:1575. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171535
Vehtari A, Gelman A, Gabry J (2017) Practical Bayesian model evaluation using leave-one-out cross-validation and WAIC. Stat Comput 27:1413–1432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-016-9696-4
Wiessner P (2009) Experimental games and games of life among the Ju/’hoan Bushmen. Curr Anthropol 50:133–138. https://doi.org/10.1086/595622
Wu J-J, Ji T, He Q-Q, Du J, Mace R (2015) Cooperation is related to dispersal patterns in Sino-Tibetan populations. Nat Commun 6:8693. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9693
Yamaguchi T (2011) Transition of mountain pastoralism: an agrodiversity analysis of the livestock population and herding strategies in Southeast Tibet, China. Hum Ecol 39:141–154. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-010-9370-y
Yao Y, Vehtari A, Simpson D, Gelman A. (2017) Using stacking to average Bayesian predictive distributions. Bayesian Anal 13(3)917–1007https://doi.org/10.1214/17-BA1091
Acknowledgments
We thank the reindeer and yak herders for their help and their patience. Thanks also to our field assistants in Norway (Ida Ophaug and Jon Mikkel Eira) and in China (Bai Pengpeng, Jiu Cili, Gong Bao Cao). We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers who give constructive criticism that has also improved the paper.
Funding
Field work and data collection in both sites were funded by “HIERARCHIES,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council (project number 240280). MWN and BJB were financed by “HIERARCHIES,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council (project number 240280). MWN, BJB, and MGT were financed by “ReiGN: Reindeer Husbandry in a Globalizing North—Resilience, Adaptations and Pathways for Actions”, which is a Nordforsk-funded “Nordic Centre of Excellence” (project number 76915). DJ was funded by the China Scholarship Council. MGT and RM received funding from European Research Council Advanced Grant AdG 249347 to RM. RM and DJ were also funded by Lanzhou University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
MGT, DJ, BJB, RM, and MWN designed research; MGT and DJ collected data; MGT analyzed data; and MGT, DJ, BJB, RM, and MWN wrote the paper.
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
We have no competing interests
Ethics
This research was approved in part by the University College London research ethics committee and by Lanzhou University. Field work in Kautokeino, Norway, was undertaken in accordance with the “General guidelines for research ethics” as stipulated by the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committee (NNREC; https://www.etikkom.no/en/). Specifically, interviews where undertaken in accordance with NNREC’s ethical checklist by (1) obtaining written informed consent, (2) ensuring that no dependent relationship exists that could influence the subjects’ decision to give consent, and (3) guaranteeing anonymity and confidentiality of the informants. See SI Text for descriptions of the study sites and data collection procedures.
Data, code, and materials
Data are deposited in [URL; DOI] and code to reproduce our analyses is available from https://github.com/matthewgthomas/hierarchies-gifts/.
Additional information
Communicated by D. Lukas
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article is a contribution to the Topical Collection Social complexity: patterns, processes, and evolution - Guest Editors: Peter Kappeler, Susanne Shultz, Tim Clutton-Brock, and Dieter Lukas
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(DOCX 557 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Du, J., Thomas, M.G., Bårdsen, BJ. et al. Comparison of social complexity in two independent pastoralist societies. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 73, 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-018-2611-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-018-2611-6