Sharing food boosts social inequalities
STUDY OF INUIT DELIVERS SURPRISING RESULT
Why do people share their hard-earned food? The question troubles anthropologists. Evolutionarily, it does not make a lot of sense. Feeding your own family is one thing. Offering the spoils of your hunt to anyone who wants them seems like a waste of energy.
Theoretical answers have included kin selection, tolerated theft, reciprocal altruism, and costly signalling of status. Sometimes, letting others help themselves to the bounty of your hunt might simply be easier than trying to protect it.
Regardless of why they do it, sharing food is consistent across human societies, and comparatively rare among other animals, so it “seems to be something that really defines us as a species,” said Elspeth Ready, an anthropologist who works among the Inuit of Nunavik in northern Quebec.
After an extensive survey of the community food sharing practices in a small Inuit village on the coast of the Hudson Strait, she has come to an unusual conclusion — sharing food can actually increase and entrench social inequality.
The mixed cash and subsistence economy of Kangiqsujuaq makes for a revealing case study.
Partly, Kangiqsujuaq is a typical small community with a cash economy. Unemployment is high, jobs are mostly public sector, with some work at stores or regional mines. Most food comes by boat in summer, with some perishables by plane weekly.
But there is also a large subsistence sharing economy, with a whole other set of practices that are crucial to everyone’s nutrition. Roughly half the meat eaten there is taken locally from the land, representing about 12 per cent of total calories, from seal, Arctic char, beluga, caribou, ptarmigan and other game.
There is a small black market, but mostly no trade in country food, in accordance with local law. Rather, the harvest is shared, often by just putting it outside and broadcasting a radio alert to everyone to help themselves.
This blended economy is the product of barely a century of what Ready calls “active manipulation of social and economic opportunities by Inuit and the policies of the Canadian federal government, which discouraged settlement until after the Second World War.”
Today, as Ready found, these practices of food hunting and sharing bind the local Inuit to the land and their cultural traditions. But they also create a self-sustaining cycle that locks power and wealth in place.
“The point here is that’s all reinforced by the relationships that that food creates,” said Ready, who was previously an archeologist, and ran a field school for local children in Kangiqsujuaq, and kept going back as she moved into anthropology. She is now a post-doctoral research associate in sociology at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
It is not a corporate elite that explains the persistence of Kangiqsujuaq’s century-old mixed economy, in which shared food plays such a crucial role. It is the sharing itself, and the social relationships it creates.
After extensive interviews and survey analysis, Ready’s discovery was that it is the richest Inuit, not the poorest, who are most engaged in subsistence food production, and that this reinforces their own social power. Only the comparatively wealthy can buy the snow machines, boats, guns, ammo, and gas needed to hunt successfully. Their generosity is linked so strongly to influence and affluence that a “positive feedback” is created, which goes some way to explaining the “dense clusters” of family relations on the local council.
"The mixed economy persists because food sharing is a strategy by which privilege is expressed and maintained by those who give,” reads the new paper in Current Anthropology, co-authored with Eleanor. A. Power of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
“Sharing does redistribute resources in the settlement, but not sufficiently to create equal opportunities for all. On the contrary, giving food creates obligations (e.g., to reciprocate in kind, to pay for gas next week) that benefit those with the resources required to be generous.”
Their network analysis “suggest that while sharing of country food is driven by reciprocity, trade, and wealth, sharing is itself a predictor of the political success and influence of wealthy households.”
“People who are generous are expected to take on some responsibility at the community level, and so this is what we see in people who share generously being more likely to be elected to local council. It’s sort of a responsibility that comes with wealth,” Ready said in an interview. “It’s really striking that these traditional norms of reciprocity have been incorporated into modern institutions.”
“Sharing is good,” she said. “It is most definitely very beneficial for the community.”
It promotes nutrition, and it allows people to eat certain special foods that are not commercially available but culturally important. But as she put it, her results “suggest that economic and political inequality in the settlement are reinforced by the social structures produced through sharing.”
IT’S SORT OF A RESPONSIBILITY THAT COMES WITH WEALTH.