Abstract
The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. Using a methodology inspired from a community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, a network of post-procurement food distributions is explored to describe underlying patterns of stability. Four pathways for food sharing are identified, including kin and non-kin distributions that are both reciprocated and unreciprocated. These four pathways obtain even when considering differences in household hunting skill, differences in household hunting wealth, the sum costs of procurement, and documented reciprocation in non-food goods and services. The interplay between traditional ecological knowledge about sharing and access to resources and the observed sharing behavior is discussed. These findings illustrate the robustness of prosocial solutions to collective action problems surrounding food procurement and security in an indigenous Siberian community.
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Acknowledgments
JZ is grateful to friends and adoptive family in Taimyr who participated in the research and hosted repeated visits. JZ also thanks Kristin Snopkowski, Delaney Glass, Shauna BurnSilver, and three anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. JZ wrote the article. DN conducted data manipulation, and provided statistical advice and comments on earlier drafts. JR conduced data manipulation and analysis. The research was supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation (2006–2009) no. 0631970 part of the BOREAS Eurocores project Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North. Fieldwork in 2001 was supported by a grant from the L.B.S. Leakey Foundation. Fieldwork in 2003 was supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
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Handled by Renee Pualani Louis, The University of Kansas, USA.
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Ziker, J.P., Rasmussen, J. & Nolin, D.A. Indigenous Siberians solve collective action problems through sharing and traditional knowledge. Sustain Sci 11, 45–55 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0293-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0293-9