 I'm Amber Woodich. I'm an anthropology professor at ASU and I'm the director of the Center for Global Health. Did you ever hear someone ask, can I borrow a cup of sugar? For many Americans, the question conjures a nostalgic image of friendly neighbors relying on each other for support and assistance. At least it does for me. I grew up in a working class neighborhood in the 1980s. All of the dads worked in skilled trades. They were plumbers, contractors, concrete layers. My dad was a journeyman electrician and his union made sure that we had good health care and a living wage. When we were little, our dads made enough money for the moms to stay at home and the moms worked together to care for their kids and our community. Later, when the moms went back to work or college, they took turns watching us kids, getting us home from school and making sure we had a snack. It wasn't just little things like snacks though. Our neighbors helped out with big things too. I remember when my grandmother needed more help caring for my great-grandmother, who lived to be 100. To make more space for her in our little house, my mom and dad built with their own hands an extra room and bathroom and all those dads from our neighborhood helped out with concrete, with plumbing, however they could. This was the original sharing economy. The cup of sugar, the labor exchange. You didn't have to pay anyone. We knew that each person would help when they could and that each family was deserving of help when they needed it. This kind of sharing is such a fundamental part of the human experience and so critical to our survival that we have been doing it for millennia. Sharing is so important that in most cultures it has its own special vocabulary and rituals. In the US for example, you may have heard of potlucks, secret Santa or re-gifting. But in many parts of the world, gifts are more than just a holiday game. Sharing helps families survive and it's a core part of people's identity that defines their place in their communities. That's why anthropologists like me have studied how humans share in cultures in every part of the world. Much of what we know about sharing and why it matters comes from studies of food sharing in hunter-gatherer bands and early farming societies. Humans shared big game that they hunted. They shared berries or honey that they had gathered and they shared the warmth of the cooking fire. Now, food is crucial to survival but it's actually not the most important thing that people need to survive. If you ask any scout or survivalist, they will tell you their old rule of thumb. You can survive for about three weeks without food but you can only survive for three days without water. Water and food are really important resources for understanding how humans stay healthy, how they organize themselves into societies and how they construct meaning around the worlds they inhabit. And that's why I focus on water and food in my research. While we know a lot about how humans used to share in hunter-gatherer bands and early farming societies, things have changed a lot for most humans around the world in the last few hundred years. Nowadays, the structure of economies worldwide is changing faster than ever. My research examines how humans in the contemporary world construct social systems around basic resources, water, food and other essentials. I'm an ethnographer which means I commit to long-term research in the field, in and with the communities I study all around the world. In each place, sharing plays an important role in people's lives, both in how they see themselves as members of their own communities and in how they make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. Let me give you a few examples. In Bolivia, I lived in a squatter settlement and studied how people survive when they don't have any running water. Most people had to buy water from trucks that sell door to door at very high prices. There were never enough trucks to get everybody the water they needed. So people created a sharing system to ensure that nobody went thirsty. Families could depend on their neighbors to lend them a bucket of water when their bin went dry and they knew it was their duty to return the favor when their neighbors ran out of water. Now, I don't mean to make this sound idyllic. Sometimes people were annoyed by their neighbors and they really did not feel like sharing their water but for these squatters, water scarcity was a life and death matter. And thanks to the sharing system and people's real understanding that water is life, a sometimes scarily precarious water system never pushed anyone I knew there to the actual brink of death. In Paraguay, I lived in a little town and I studied the lives of people who depended on backyard farms for food. Life as a small-scale farmer is hard but it's okay if you have enough people to milk the cow and feed the animals and so forth. But if somebody gets sick or they can't do those jobs every day, you can get into real trouble. While I was there, I documented many cases in which neighbors pitched in during times of trouble to help each other. I remember one case in which a granny's husband had died. While she was in mourning and planning for the funeral which is a major nine-day undertaking in Paraguay, her neighbor sent someone to milk her cow every day. In another case, a family's eldest daughter had played an important role in caring for her family and younger siblings and she had to have surgery. So neighbors sent baskets of food to make sure the family had enough to eat until the girl could recover. Like in Bolivia, this community came together to make sure that each family had enough food and wasn't pushed past its ability to survive. By working together, each family gets helped when they're in trouble and gives help in its turn. My research sites in Bolivia and Paraguay help us understand how people use sharing to overcome what could be a major crisis when households run out of water or food. As important as each individual story and research site is, ethnographic research is much more powerful and can teach us much, much more about how humans survive when we bring the lessons learned from each site into conversation with each other. Here at ASU, I direct an international network of ethnographers. Together, we examine cross-cultural differences and similarities in the ways that humans exchange, manage, and put a value on vital resources like water and food. Cross-cultural research like ours has yielded important lessons in how humans can use sharing as a tool for survival. It turns out for sharing to really work, to really help people survive, a society has to be structured in a special way. It has to have economic diversity. There has to be an expectation of give and take. There should be rich relationships that involve exchanges without money. And most importantly, there must be a moral economy. These are the values that recognize our humanity, our dignity, and survival as shared goals. Basically, they acknowledge the right of everyone to life and basic security. So let me tell you one last story. This one is about the United States. Back in 2007, I started doing research with immigrants here in Phoenix, Arizona. Lots of people here come from Mexico, and historically in Mexico, there have been strong, culturally rich traditions of sharing. And at the start of our research, we found these traditions to be alive and well here in Arizona's immigrant communities. But then, the economy crashed. People were losing jobs, losing houses, going bankrupt. Everyone was affected at once. These vital sharing networks could not handle the enormous need. Our communities were no longer economically diverse because the whole economy was collapsing. In the wake of this, many immigrants were forced to leave. As their sharing networks fell apart, we documented one last exchange people promised each other. That if they were picked up off the street and deported, their neighbors and friends promised to find their kids and take them home. The story is not an isolated one. In the US and elsewhere in the world, changes in the structure of the economy increases in income and social inequality and the erosion of basic economic security have all but destroyed vital sharing economies. And even in relatively well off communities, like the working class neighborhood where I grew up, the growing practice of putting a price on everything, of getting a ride, of having a house guest, even a little cup of water in a little plastic bottle is undermining one's proud traditions of sharing. So what can we do to change this? At an individual level, we can engage with social organizations that help us build trusting relationships. For many of us, this might mean a church, a temple or a mosque, a volunteer group or a charity, a soccer club, a book club or a roller derby team. In these settings, we can nurture trusting relationships by building the give and take of sharing food and labor. When somebody has a baby or a death in the family, we can do more than just emailing a gift card. We can cook and share and help. We can shy away from making everyday exchanges about money or accepting payback and think of other ways to reciprocate. And on a societal level, we can do more too. We can resist the impulse to commodify everything, carry a water bottle rather than buying a disposable one, have a potluck rather than going out to dinner. And when we think about transforming our economy, we can think beyond marketing the latest must have app or gizmo. When we think bigger and differently, we can think of truly transformative ways to exchange, to coexist, to support each other and to thrive together. Sharing is part of what makes us human, but we need to nurture relationships and even societies that humanize us. Thanks.