Why hunter-gatherers work: An ancient version of the problem of public goods
citation_date
2001-08
Description
From the abstract: People who hunt and gather for a living share some resources more widely than others. A favored hypothesis to explain the differential sharing is that giving up portions of large, unpredictable resources obligates others to return shares of them later, reducing everyone's variance in consumption. I show that this insurance argument is not empirically supported for !Kung, Ache, and Hadza foragers. An alternative hypothesis is that the cost of _not_ sharing these resources is too high to pay.
Type
text;
citation_publisher
University of Chicago Press
citation_volume
34
citation_issue
4
citation_keywords
Hunter-gatherer societies; Public goods
Subject (LCSH)
Hunting and gathering societies; Economic anthropology
citation_language
eng;
Bibliographic Citation
Hawkes, K. (1993). Why Hunter-gatherers work. Current Anthropology, 34(4), 341.
