Cooperative Practices in Hunter-Fisher-Gatherers from Tierra Del Fuego: A Study on Resource Visibility and Social Sharing

Abstract

Cooperation studies have become an essential area of knowledge across different disciplines. Within the humanities and the social sciences, it has been used to explain human behavior as well as the maintenance of the social tissue itself. It has also given clues to explain the variability and the plasticity of human social organization at different levels.In this presentation we focus on Yamana society a nomadic hunter-fisherer-gatherer group that inhabited the southernmost region of South America and who maintained this socio-economic organization approximately till the 30s of the last century. This society developed a range of cooperative practices (through production, distribution and consumption activities) that took place mostly during aggregation events caused by a great accumulation of resources. Through Agent Based Modelling we pretend to explore the role played by different variables that may influence the development of these cooperation practices.The aim of this paper is to present some theoretical and methodological results of this study.