Steppe generosity: cooperation, labor sharing, and generous giving among Mongolian pastoral nomads

Cooperation abounds in human communities and enables humans to gain access to resources, form coalitions with others, mitigate economic and ecological risks, and signal personal qualities to others. Cooperation has been documented in all human subsistence patterns, including pastoralist societies. However, cooperation in Inner Asian pastoral nomad cultures remains understudied and poorly understood from a behavioral perspective. In this dissertation, I use a human behavioral ecology approach to understand 1) the dynamics of labor sharing in a remote community of Mongolian pastoralists, 2) the major drivers of generous giving in rural Mongolia, and 3) how natural disasters, like severe winter storms, affect Mongolian pastoralists’ willingness and ability to engage in cooperative behavior. Mongolian nomadic pastoralists were chosen as the community of focus because they engage in a variety of labor sharing practices and are affected by ecological risks such as droughts and severe winter conditions. In Chapter 2, recipient identity conditioned heuristic (RICH) allocation games are used to explore generous giving among both men and women in a Mongolian herding community and show that generous giving is driven primarily by a kinship, social reputations, and a person’s perceived neediness. In Chapter 3, social network analyses are used to explore labor sharing ties for 6 commonly cooperative labor types in a sample of 47 pastoral nomad households and show that labor sharing ties are largely explained by blood and marital kinship and social reputations. In Chapter 4, common pool resource experimental economic games are used to explore the effects of natural disasters on cooperation in Mongolia. While the results are inconclusive, the study represents the first-ever application of this type of experimental game in Mongolia and show that Mongolian pastoralists can effectively manage common pool resources in an experimental setting. The dissertation concludes in Chapter 5 with a synopsis of the results of each chapter and suggestions for future research on cooperation in both Mongolia and pastoralist societies more generally.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference