Paper short abstract:

Nicolas Peterson’s notion of demand sharing has become part of the anthropological orthodoxy in Australia and has been used by the bureaucracy to partially justify income quarantining in remote Aboriginal Australia. This construct is re-examined with data from Arnhem Land on distribution of harvested game and arts income.

Paper long abstract:

Negative and positive reciprocity are diametric opposites. In the former, one looks to benefit from exchange in an asymmetric way. In the latter people give goods or services irrespective of balance in an apparently altruistic way. Historically, this spectrum was covered by Sahlins' schema explained by kinship distance. But in 1993, Nicolas Peterson introduced the new notion of demand sharing into the anthropological lexicon to describe a particular mode of distribution based on a very direct demand. The term 'demand sharing' has now been adopted in policy discourse in Australia to partially explain the absence of individual or household control over resources and to partially justify the quarantining of people's welfare income in Australia's Northern Territory.

This paper re-assesses the notion of demand sharing with evidence from Arnhem Land. Examining information about wildlife harvesting by Kuninjku people in 2002 and 2003 the extraordinary effort made by successful harvesters to distribute game to kin residing far way without any explicit demands is documented. And examining information on the earnings of artists producing for the market, it assess why artists would expend effort in arts production if sharing risked immediate dissipation of returns? Is demand sharing a dominant mode of distribution or just one mode among many utilised by Aboriginal Australians today. Demand sharing might be an important corrective to the notion that hunter-gatherers share property altruistically. But has this term now unintentionally become a gloss for any Indigenous forms of sharing that challenges western individualistic notions of property and sensibilities?