Sharing, Presence and the Built Environment

Comparative ethnographic research suggests that the creation of co-presence is one of the main strategies for enabling sharing and for demanding a share. Conversely, avoiding or disabling co-presence is a key strategy for dealing with sharing demands. This contribution investigates how shaping the built environment is related to key features of sharing as a social practice. It is argued that sharing is characterized by a particular mutuality, temporality and sequentiality that distinguishes it from redistribution and reciprocal exchange and which, correspondingly, has specific implications for changes in the built environment. The emphasis will be on well-documented cases from the ethnography of hunter-gatherers but reference is also made to phenomena relating to land-use in large-scale societies, including digital platforms of the so-called sharing economy. The article compares the spatial dimension of sharing with that of storage and mobility, two other major strategies that humans have developed for dealing with the transience of resources.