Rebecca Bliege Bird: Stanford University Department of Anthropology

Anthropologists commonly invoke an “economy of scale” to explain gender differences in hunter-gatherer subsistence and economic production: wives pursue childcare-compatible tasks and husbands, of necessity, provision wives and offspring with hunted meat. This theory explains little about the division of labor among the Australian Martu, where women hunt extensively, and gendered asymmetry in foraging decisions is linked to men’s and women’s different social strategies. Women cooperate with other women primarily hunt small, predictable game (lizards) to provision small kin networks, to feed children, and to maintain their cooperative relationships with other women. They trade off large harvests against greater certainty. Men tend to hunt as a political strategy, using a form of “competitive magnanimity” to rise in the ritual hierarchy and demonstrate their capacity to keep sacred knowledge. Resources that can provision the most others with the most meat best fit this strategy, resulting in an emphasis on kangaroo. They trade off reliable consumption benefits to the nuclear family for more unpredictable benefits in social standing. Among the Martu, gender differences in the costs and benefits of engaging in competitive magnanimity, rather than an economy of scale, structure men’s more risk-prone and women’s more risk-averse foraging decisions. These results suggest an alternative model of the foraging division of labor that emphasizes the role of ecological variance and social competition and de-emphasizes essentialized sexual and reproductive dichotomies.