When:
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Where: 160 Cunz Hall
Denis Tverskoi, a Postdoc with OSU HEALMOD Laboratory, will be giving a talk titled "The role of reciprocity and graduated sanctioning in the evolution of sustainable swidden agriculture"
Full description:
Swidden agriculture is one of the earliest forms of land cultivation widely practiced by humans throughout history. Currently, about 500 million people (mainly living in indigenous and smallholder communities) rely on swidden cultivation controlling land containing 17% of the world's tropical and subtropical forest carbon and 50-75% of the world's remaining biodiversity. Therefore, a deep understanding of the social, cultural, and ecological determinants of sustainable swidden agriculture is crucial for mitigating climate change. Ethnographic research on Maya communities reveals that individuals rely on reciprocity-driven labor exchange networks to clear and cultivate their fields but may withhold labor if clearing demands are excessive. Utilizing cultural evolution theory, we study theoretically how this sanctioning mechanism and reciprocity may shape the evolution of sustainable and intensive swidden agriculture. Employing evolutionary game theory and agent-based simulations, we show that the balance between sanctioning and reciprocity is crucial for such evolution: helping behavior should be significantly conditioned by sanctioning to prevent deforestation, while reciprocity is necessary to prevent excessive sanctioning. Our findings indicate that the sustainable swidden regime is robust to changes in group size, but larger groups should demonstrate tighter sanctioning norms. We also show that sustainable swidden agriculture can evolve in various ecological settings but is more efficient in forest ecosystems aligned with the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. Overall, our contribution is two-fold. First, we supplement the existing literature on the Common Pool Resource games by examining the effects of punishment in the context of labor exchange networks. Second, we illuminate the key role of indigenous traditional norms in maintaining sustainable and intensive slashand-burn agriculture meaning that the disruption and erosion of local traditional social structures and practices can lead to significant environmental threats on the global scale.
