The Journal of California Anthropology

What ecological relationships can account for essential differences in social and economic organization among societies as different as, for example, the Kalahari Bushmen and Australian desert aborigines, as opposed to the Northwest Coast and northwestern California Indians? Rather than review the whole range of differences, this paper will focus on one key aspect of this process of differentiation: the contrast between what I shall term here sharing vs. aggrandizive systems of resource allocation.