Paper short abstract:

Cooperation is a matter both of pragmatic rationality and of emotional commitment to local models of kinship and mutual assistance. I use data from my own fieldwork and from the KASS project to explore these connections in modern European settings.

Paper long abstract:

A fundamental question for this workshop is whether pragmatically motivated choices by autonomous individuals can lead to cooperation. The alpine and Russian country-dwellers amongst whom I have conducted field research would strongly agree that they can - both vigorously asserting that the need for mutual assistance produces the actual behaviour. In the alpine case they use this idea to explain why, since the arrival of late-twentieth-century prosperity, they no longer cooperate much; while in the Russian case they use it to explain the continuing high levels of cooperation between kin and neighbours. Data collected for the KASS (Kinship and Social Security) project confirm that the long-term decline of peasant agriculture in Europe has been associated with a decline in local and kin-based cooperation.

However, the ethnographic data also shows that, though rationality certainly comes into it, this is not simply a matter of rational choice. Cooperation involves emotional commitment to specific patterns of social relationships - patterns that are conceived of as enduring through time. These models of kinship and cooperation differ greatly between societies - including between European societies. I conclude the paper by reviewing evidence that differences in the local patterning of kinship ties are associated with different responses to recent economic changes.