[.ca] Food Rules: Hunting, Sharing, and Tabooing Game in Papua ... (ISBN 0472097059)

Excellent book on food sharing and hunting-horticulturalists:
This book is a wonderful book in many ways. It is the result of intensive anthropological fieldwork among the Seltaman, a remote hunter/horticulturalist people living in the highland rainforest of Papua New Guinea. Food sharing becomes a window into their entire culture. But I think it also becomes a window into a potential for a different type of society, one in which sharing, particularly of food, underlies a strong ethics of generosity. Many traditional societies have had this basis. Harriet Whitehead does not "hype" the implications of her careful and intellectually very honest study. But wide implications are there. We need to pursue the study of traditional "sharing societies" as a way of understanding the underpinnings of human societies in general. I think they are potentially key to a new comparative ethics and economics (as well as anthropology).