MediaBerkman

Rebecca Bliege Bird on Mutualism, Altruism, and Signaling in Martu Women’s Cooperative Hunting

March 8th, 2010

Rebecca Bliege Bird tested a conventional hypothesis of cooperative hunting – that working together will yield higher returns than working alone – among female hunters of the Martu Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. She found that cooperation only provides increased returns to poorer hunters while disadvantaging better hunters. Rebecca tests a signaling model of benefit, which proposes that better hunters share a greater proportion of their catch than poorer hunters as a way to signal a commitment to public goods provisioning and egalitarianism through their ‘pecuniary disinterest’.

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