ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I outlined why it has taken some time before sharing became accepted as a distinct category, a phenomenon that needed an explanation in its own right. Interpreting sharing events as if they were commercial transactions or gift exchanges is to misread these events. The message from comparative anthropology is that sharing events are different enough to require a distinct theoretical account. The following chapters address the question of which theoretical account in particular might be appropriate to shed more light on sharing. A literature search on “sharing” as a key word quickly shows that a lot of scholarly texts about the subject are written from a perspective of evolutionary theory. Explaining things on the basis of their origin is the dominant explanatory blueprint in science and the humanities. Moreover, sharing is also frequently referred to in debates about the evolution of other aspects of human culture and sociality. In this chapter I discuss these two links between sharing and evolutionary thought in turn. I then turn to an alternative, practice-oriented approach, to be developed in detail in the chapters to follow, that looks at the temporal dimension of sharing in a very different way than evolutionary approaches.
