Nicolas Peterson, an anthropologist who spent time living among Yolngu Aboriginal foragers in Australia’s Arnhem Land in the 1980s, famously described their redistributive practices as “demand sharing.”5 The term has since stuck. It is now used to describe all societies where food and objects are shared on the basis of requests by the receiver rather than offers made by the giver. It may only be in hunter-gatherer economies that demand sharing is the principal means through which objects and materials flow between people, but the phenomenon of demand sharing is not unique to their societies.
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