Kishigami, Nobuhiro. 2021. Food Sharing in Human Societies: Anthropological Perspectives, Springer Nature Singapore, ISBN: 9789811678103

In this relatively slim volume, Nobuhiro Kishigami provides a deep examination of an aspect of hunter-gatherer economic systems that is as critical to these systems as is the hunting and harvesting that provide the “stuff” that peoples like Inuit, Ache and Aka rely on for cultural and nutritional sustenance. This volume is a product of solid scholarship and is an important contribution to a growing literature focused on food sharing. However, before taking an in-depth look at the volume’s substance, I should note that the books primary title, Food Sharing in Human Societies, suggests a breadth that encompasses food sharing under a range of societal and economic types. More accurately, however, Food Sharing is an expansive work focused on food practices by hunter-gatherer cultures.

Kishigami opens with a comprehensive overview of the theories and thinking about what sharing is and the how’s and why’s of the practice. It is followed by three chapters of detailed case studies (Chapters Two, Three, and Four). Chapter Five offers a broader and more comparative discussion about food sharing in terms of bio-physical and socio-cultural factors that are relevant to the theoretical approaches that have been applied in the case societies. It should be noted that two of the presented cases (from Nunavik/Northern Québec and North Alaska) are ones to which Kishigami has directly contributed through his extensive field studies among the Québec Nunavimmiut and Alaskan Inupiat whalers, while those from Greenland, the Central African Republic and Paraguay rely on the theoretical approaches to food sharing taken in the original investigations.  

Food Sharing’s introductory chapter very usefully presents theoretical approaches to sharing as developed through two main theoretical lenses, behavioral ecology and what I term (to borrow from economic anthropology) as a substantivist approach, and how these have been analytically applied to explain why hunter-gatherers share. Here, Kishigami very usefully provides definitions of the terminology of sharing (importantly of such concepts as gifting and generalized reciprocity) and then presents the different explanations developed within these two theoretical approaches on what is essentially a generalized feature in hunter-gatherers economies. Because interpretations of food sharing are frequently derived in specific research situations already framed by a particular theoretical approach, comparison between cases can be difficult and so this first chapter will be useful to some readers.

This overview is followed by three chapters (Two, Three, Four) of case studies, the focus of which is sharing as practiced by five societies living in very different ecological, political and economic environments. This approach allows the reader to comparatively evaluate the cases in terms of the specific environments that surround and influence each society. He then analyzes each in terms of one or more of the modes of thought presented in the volume’s introductory chapter and that was analytically employed in the original studies from which the cases are drawn. Kishigami concludes Food Sharing with a discussion of how particular hypotheses (such as resource abundance, camp population size, kinship relations and/or co-residential proximity, display and status, and tolerated theft to name a few) explain food sharing (or not) in the context of the various analytical approaches in which they are discussed.

While this book is an excellent addition to a growing literature on food sharing, there are a few things that to me are somewhat problematic. One is the scope as suggested by the book’s title. Food Sharing, as already noted, focuses, except for what amounts to a few brief mentions, on hunter-gatherer societies; indeed, the preponderance of anthropological research on food sharing is especially focused on so-called subsistence economy cultures. A second is that there is some “repetitive-redundancy” as Dr. Kishigami returns in several places to the issue of reciprocity with regards to sharing. The conceptual and practical problem with the term, despite