The Anthropology of Thievery: The Material and Behavioral Background of the “Tolerated Theft” among Hunter-Gatherers

This article aims to demonstrate the behavioral patterns and cultural-ecological grounds on which tolerated theft raised as a legitimate practice within the context of resource distribution. Consideration of the main findings of recent studies in the field in combination with the predictions of the dialectic materialism allows us to suggest that both tolerated theft and archaic forms of “public good” status were emerged under the similar material conditions. Based on the law of diminishing marginal utility, it is argued that theft is tolerated when it is concerned with the optimality of food sharing in small-scale groups. We then suggest that this is true especially for the groups of which their survival is highly dependent on a single resource. Among hunter-gatherers, meat of big games representing staple resource of subsistence is valued in a way that it is shared “equally” among group members including those who did not participate in its acquisition. It can therefore be assumed that existing level of the productive forces entails some behavioral pattern like tolerated theft that make acquirers unable to control the distribution of certain food items. Such food items are then treated as “partial public goods” for the group. Examination of the tolerated theft practice in hunter-gatherers also shows us the followings: These small-sized and less complex communities lacking centralized political organisations have a good knowledge of distribution of the staples without falling into conflict. Their subsistence system principally operates to serve “sharing” rather than storage. Thus, they have survived for thousands of years within an equilibrium mix of hunters and scroungers produced by the evolutionary process