<p>The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of food-sharing in a multi-ethnic village in southwestern Ethiopia, by focusing on how and to whom crops are distributed. It will also reveal the dynamic process underlying sharing activities, by analyzing peoples' interactions when giving to others and keeping things for themselves. In most literature concerning peasant studies, the issues of wealth-sharing and reciprocal assistance have long been discussed in terms of their cultural aspects. Despite the wide variety of concepts surrounding peasants' economic behavior, there is a common perception that the sharing custom is derived from the peasants' cultural traits. Those arguments are more or less based on the assumption that peasant communities are culturally homogeneous, perpetuating a system of distribution of wealth clearly distinct from the one of "homo economics." Are those characteristics no longer applicable to newly established settlements dependent on cash crops, or multi-ethnic urban-like communities? In the rapidly changing situation of rural Africa, it is now widely observed that peasant communities are heavily dependent on a cash economy or wage labor, and the demographic mobility between the urban and the rural is increasingly growing. The view of peasant economic behavior based on static cultural features has to be reconsidered. In this paper, I focus on a rural community in highland Ethiopia, where migrants from a variety of ethnic backgrounds have settled to produce cash crops. The people have different cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs, and it is almost impossible to find a single cultural trait or concept shared by all the villagers. That kind of culturally heterogeneous community can provide a much wider basis for understanding the dynamic processes of food sharing in a changing society of contemporary Africa. In section II, I focus on the sharing activities among villagers. During the harvest time of some crops and a period of food shortage during the rainy season, the well-off voluntarily give some crops, or are asked to give them. The case study indicates that people do not always give more to those in closer relationships, but share their food with various persons ranging from close relatives to unfamiliar persons, even totally unknown ones. Moreover, in all the cases, the donors did not seem to expect any reward in return. In fact, counter-gifts were given in just a few exceptional cases. In section III, I focus on the social relationships in sharing activity. What difference is there between sharing with close relatives and sharing with unknown persons? I examine the contrasting cases of close relatives and of strangers, and argue that different kind of motivations can be observed. While relatively wealthy persons constantly feel the pressure to share wealth with other relatives, strangers are easily associated with holiness or sacredness, and are respected and sometimes feared by the villagers. I will argue that those mixed feelings drive people to share food even with socially distant persons. In section IV, I examine the peoples' perceptions of and dilemmas about food sharing. While Muslim villagers seem to share food with their relatives, neighbors and poor villagers, following the Islamic principle, they also face a dilemma in which giving too much food would leave too little for themselves, especially during the rainy season. So it sometimes happens that people refuse the demand for crops and repel the beggars. They do not always follow the religious precepts unhesitatingly, in other words. I also analyze the beggars' approaches in getting crops, and the donors' avoidance of giving, and conclude that whether people share their crops or not is largely determined by the interactive negotiation between the beggar and the donor. And finally, in section V, by reconsidering the issue of</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>