Indigenous Siberians solve collective action problems through sharing and traditional knowledge

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. Using a methodology inspired from a community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, a network of post-procurement food distributions is explored to describe underlying patterns of stability. Four pathways for food sharing are identified, including kin and non-kin distributions that are both reciprocated and unreciprocated. These four pathways obtain even when considering differences in household hunting skill, differences in household hunting wealth, the sum costs of procurement, and documented reciprocation in non-food goods and services. The interplay between traditional ecological knowledge about sharing and access to resources and the observed sharing behavior is discussed. These findings illustrate the robustness of prosocial solutions to collective action problems surrounding food procurement and security in an indigenous Siberian community.