Past Event: Biological Anthropology Brown Beer: James Holland Jones

Title: “Efficiency is the Enemy: The Emergent Structure of Subsistence Risk-Management Networks”

James Holland Jones (Stanford University)

Abstract: In his 1976 monograph, Moral Economy of the Peasant, James Scott specifically engages in the “safety first” principle of decision theory to describe the production and exchange systems of people living in agrarian subsistence economies. In this talk, I extend and formalize these ideas for subsistence populations, and hunter-gatherers in particular. As with all subsistence populations, hunter-gatherers are exposed to substantial livelihood risk because of the inherently variable nature of their resource base. As noted by numerous scholars of hunter-gatherer economics, the primary mechanism of risk management among hunter-gatherers is food-sharing. Furthermore, while the social structure of hunter-gatherers is diverse, depending on many of the specific details of local ecology, a number of common features of social organization have emerged. In particular, hunter-gatherer social organization is characterized by extreme flexibility, both logistical and residential; by the formation of bilateral “households” centered on a pair bond embedded within a larger community; by extensive individual and household autonomy. Risk is managed through a remarkable combination of flexibility and a paradoxical combination of simultaneous independence and intense interdependence, which I call Independence with Risk Pooling (IwRP). The fundamental risk-management nature of hunter-gatherer social organization leads to a number of predictions about the structure of exchange networks that form from food-sharing across individuals and households. Generalized exchange is commonly seen in exchange and marriage networks and has been shown to stabilize group cooperation. Behaviorally, networks reflecting generalized exchange are typically assumed to arise from cyclical relations. I show that the risk-management objectives are better served by a transitive, hierarchical generative process, which results in an overall core-periphery network structure. Using data on the country-food sharing by Inuit hunters in Nunavik, Elspeth Ready (MPI-EVA) and I show that sharing networks are highly transitive and show a remarkable core-periphery structure, supporting our predictions of the emergent properties of subsistence risk-management networks. 

This event is a part of the fall lineup for the Biological Anthropology Brown Beer series.

This event is a hybrid event, in person at 10 Sachem st, Rm 105, and on Zoom. To get access to a Zoom link, please contact: sakura.oyama@yale.edu or alyssa.enny@yale.edu.