It's Good to Know Who Your Relatives Are but We Were Taught to Share with Everybody: Shares and Sharing among Inupiaq Households

BODENHORN two households.I want to do two things with that information in this chapter.I want first to examine what seem to me to be quite important differences between the category of a share' (ningik) and the actions implied by sharing' among the Inupiat of northern Alaska.2)In brief, I shall argue that shares are not about reciprocity, whereas sharing most certainly is.Secondly, the moral nature of this sharing invites us to consider the implications of this material for economic anthropology as a whole.As a range of complex processes, sharing, I suggest, cannot easily be held apart from gift' and/or commodity' in any consideration of the nature of property.Thus, it should be of interest not only to those of us who want to understand social relations in hunting and gathering societies but also to any anthropologist interested in the social nature of circulated resources in general.The complexity of property relations among hunters has been the subject of discussion for more than a decade (see in particular Ingold, Riches and Woodburn 1988, vol.2;Wilmsen 1988).Ingold 1983: 562 for hunter-gatherers in general, Burch 1988 for the Arctic, Hayden 1994 with reference to competition and most recently Woodburn for what he terms Immediate Return' societies 1998 all argue that hunter/gatherer exchange relations are much wider in scope than is recognised in Sahlins ' 1972 generalised reciprocity model which has been so frequently applied to them.In fact, Woodburn's strong argument is that sharing is not about reciprocity at all on the grounds that donation is obligatory and is disconnected from the right to receive ' 1998: 50.On the North Slope of Alaska, shares' involve a single transaction in which the division of meat satisfies a claim that earned through contribution to the hunting effbrt.Echoing Woodburn, access to these shares is dependent neither on negotiation with nor on generosity from the giver.As we shall see, however, unlike the unconditional and universal access to meat described by Woodburn, Inupiat are quite explicit that shares' (with one important exception) are something someone has a right to because he or she has already fulfi11ed a responsibility.These shares, although non-negotiable, are absolutely a right to a return in exchange for the contribution made.3)What Woodburn calls sharing' I would call a share'-and do so because Inupiat themselves make that linguistic distinction.Sharing' does not denote a thing of value, but rather a complex of social actions all of which create and maintain morally valued relationships that extend well beyond hunting itself.As Neakok said above, it brings with it a sense of well-being and as we shall see it is crucially about reciprocity.I am quite aware how much this language resonates with the Maussian language of gift.Sharing, however, is not gifting; how and why this is not so bears some consideration.This brings me back to my second focus, namely to think about some of the implications this material might have for economic anthropology as a whole.The fact that sharing is a complex rather than uniform process is even more significant when we think about the extent to which it must be thought in conjunction with, rather than as separated off from, gifting and commoditizing.That this should be It's Good to Know Who Your Relatives Are 29 so in late 20th century Barrow, funded by property taxes paid by oil companies, is perhaps not surprising; Burch 's 1988 late 19th century material suggests strongly that this is not simply a function of contact' which should therefore be dismissed as transitional.Sharing, gifting and commoditizing all played important roles in the social lives of 19th century Inupiat, just as they do, albeit in different ways, today.Inupiat clearly neither can nor should be made to stand for all hunter gatherers.