Nobuhiro Kishigami – författare

This book explores why human beings share food with others using a humanistic anthropological approach. This book provides a comparative examination of distinct features and historical changes in food-sharing practices in various hunting-gathering societies, especially in the Inuit. The author considers human nature through various human food-sharing practices. Food sharing is a characteristic of human behavior and has been one of the central topics in anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers for a long time. While anthropologists have attempted to understand it in functional, historical, adaptational, social, cultural, psychological, or phenomenological perspective, they have failed to convincingly explain its origin, variation, existence or/and change. Recently, evolutionary ecology or behavioral ecology has dominated research of the topic. However, neither of them adequately considers social, cultural and historical factors in the analysis of human food-sharing practices. Thisbook is an essential and fundamental study for every researcher interested in the relationship between human nature, society and culture.

This book examines the past history, and contemporary status of subsistence whaling. The papers derive from a symposium ‘Aboriginal Whaling and Identity in the 21st Century’ held at the Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies in Vienna, Austria in September 2015. Whales, especially large baleen whales, are the largest animals targeted by many societies, prehistoric or modern, and major facets of subsistence, social structure and ideology are still deeply embedded in past and current whaling lifeways.  Yet there is probably no other environmental/political issue that has attracted as much attention in the late 20th and early 21st century as whaling practices and policies.  Accordingly, the papers address two major themes: 1) the extent and characteristics of major prehistoric and early historic whaling activities, and 2) case studies amongst modern whaling societies, and how these societies are impacted by current political and economic realities and by the anti-whaling movement.