Abstract

Informal resource exchange networks are fundamental to people’s livelihoods in many remote and rural communities worldwide. For hunter-gatherer and former hunter-gatherer populations in particular, food sharing is often central to their subsistence system and to their cultural identity. Food sharing is often understood as serving a risk-management function, but an important question in evolutionary anthropology is how these networks are maintained despite potential vulnerability to free-riders. These concerns are not simply academic. In the North American Arctic, for instance, locally-produced foods like caribou, seal, and fish are widely distributed through sharing networks and are important for food security, but many Inuit fear that sharing is declining due to a variety of factors, including population growth, increasing dependence on cash income, and formal schooling. In this talk I first consider structural features of networks that might stabilize or destabilize resource exchange, and explore these phenomena empirically using food sharing network data from Kangiqsujuaq, an Inuit community in Nunavik, Canada. I then present a preliminary analysis of change in food sharing networks in Kangiqsujuaq between 2013 and 2023, using a decomposition approach that reveals that the network structure is deeply influenced by  household lifecycles. I consider the broader implications of the findings for supporting the food security of remote rural communities in the context of climate change.

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• Elspeth Ready is a researcher in the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology, and Culture at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. She conducts multidisciplinary research at the intersection of anthropology, economics, and psychology, with themes that strongly resonate with those of the CEE-M. Her work focuses primarily on community-based research in the Canadian Arctic. Her current project explores, among other things, food security and the interactions between monetary and subsistence economies in Arctic communities. Below an acces to her two most recent publications, which draw on this interdisciplinary approach combining anthropology and economics :

• • Hillemann F, Beheim BA, Ready E. 2023 Socio-economic predictors of Inuit hunting choices and their implications for climate change adaptation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 378: 20220395. >>>
  • E. Ready,C.T. Ross,B. Beheim,& J. Parrott, 2024 Indigenous food production in a carbon economy, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (32) e2317686121 >>>

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