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Interhousehold Meat Sharing among Mayangna and Miskito Horticulturalists in Nicaragua

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Abstract

Recent analyses of food sharing in small-scale societies indicate that reciprocal altruism maintains interhousehold food transfers, even among close kin. In this study, matrix-based regression methods are used to test the explanatory power of reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and tolerated scrounging. In a network of 35 households in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve, the significant predictors of food sharing include kinship, interhousehold distance, and reciprocity. In particular, resources tend to flow from households with relatively more meat to closely related households with little, as predicted by kin selection. This generalization is especially true of household dyads with mother-offspring relationships, which suggests that studies of food sharing may benefit from distinctions between lineal and collateral kin. Overall, this analysis suggests that exchanges among kin are primarily associated with differences in need, not reciprocity. Finally, although large game is distributed widely, qualitative observations indicate that hunters typically do not relinquish control of the distribution in ways predicted by costly signaling theory.

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  1. Because households that harvest relatively little fish and game may compensate by increasing their production of domestic animals, it would be preferable to incorporate such production into the measure of household need, but the weights of slaughtered domestic animals were not recorded. However, there appears to be little relationship between a household’s per capita acquisition of fish and game and the household’s per capita consumption of domestic animal products, as measured in the cumulative hits per person per day of household-produced beef, pork, fowl, eggs, or milk (Pearson’s r = 0.26; p = 0.13; n = 35). To the extent that household consumption is an index of household production, this result suggests that households do not compensate for the relative lack of fish and game by focusing on domesticated animals.

  2. Hames (1987) calls this measure specific balance, but this study uses the terminology of Allen-Arave et al. (2008).

  3. By contrast, using the closest interhousehold tie (r = 0.36, p < 0.001) accounts for less of the variation in interhousehold exchange. Average interhousehold relatedness, the measure used by Allen-Arave et al. (2008), is a marginally stronger predictor (r = 0.41, p < 0.001), apparently because 16 of the 20 most closely related households using this measure include mother-offspring relationships.

  4. When a dummy matrix of shared community membership is included in a multivariate QAP regression model with the distance matrix, both the dummy variable (β = −0.39, p = 0.01) and distance (β = −0.66, p < 0.001) are significant predictors. Yet the amount of variance explained by this multivariate model (R 2 = 0.08) is essentially identical to the variance explained by distance alone (R 2 = 0.08). The results are not presented in this paper, but the dummy matrix of shared community membership was initially included as a predictor in all of the multivariate models presented below. Although this variable was a significant predictor, it typically altered only the standardized parameter estimates of distance as a predictor variable. The interpretation of all other variables remained unchanged.

  5. Whereas the household C:P ratio exhibits little relationship to the per capita harvest of wild game (Pearson’s r = −0.03; p = 0.89; n = 35), there is a significant negative correlation between household C:P ratio and the per capita harvest of fish (Pearson’s r = −0.45; p = 0.007; n = 35). In general, households with numerous young children harvest relatively little fish whereas households with primarily older children and adults harvest relatively more.

  6. Although households now maintain separate dwellings, Conzemius (1932) reports that the indigenous societies of the Mosquitia formerly used communal, multifamily houses.

  7. Kaplan and Gurven (2005) briefly comment that the Ache data from Arroyo Bandera reveal greater imbalances (i.e., less reciprocity) among kin of disparate ages, such as parents and offspring, than among kin of similar ages, such as siblings. This result more closely conforms to the results of this study and its emphasis on mother-offspring relationships, but these data from Arroyo Bandera have apparently not been published.

  8. In this study, the exception to this generalization involves communal meals at church-related activities, to which hunters sometimes donate meat while other families contribute other kinds of foods, firewood, candles, coffee, etc. However, these activities are relatively rare and probably account for less than 5% of the total meat consumption during the study period.

  9. Approximately 41% of the purchases of tapir meat were preceded or accompanied by gifted portions to the same household, which raises the intriguing possibility that these gifts serve as “free samples” that subsequently motivate purchases of larger portions.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Fulbright student grant, the National Science Foundation (Dissertation Improvement Award #0413037), the Hill Foundation, and a William Sanders dissertation grant. David Nolin provided helpful perspectives on the analysis, as did Mark Grote, who also assisted in the design of Fig. 2. Carmen McCane generated the matrix of interhousehold distance. Bruce Winterhalder and three anonymous reviewers offered valuable suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript. Special thanks to Jeff Johnson and Chris McCarty for their tutelage during an NSF-sponsored short course on social network analysis.

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    Jeremy Koster

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Koster, J. Interhousehold Meat Sharing among Mayangna and Miskito Horticulturalists in Nicaragua. Hum Nat 22, 394–415 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-011-9126-4

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