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- Convenors:
-
Robin Smith
(Copenhagen Business School)
Nicolette Makovicky (University of Oxford)
- Discussant:
-
Lotta Björklund Larsen
(University of Exeter)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Infrastructure
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 14
- Start time:
- 20 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
We invite researchers to consider the ways in which state efforts to instill fiscal discipline through the collection of taxes shape how the state is imagined, materialized, and experienced by citizens in everyday life.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have recently examined the cultures and material infrastructures of bureaucracy to understand encounters between citizens, state institutions, and state agents (Hull 2012, Graeber 2015, Mathur 2016). We invite researchers to consider the ways in which state efforts to instill fiscal discipline through the collection of taxes shape how the state is imagined, materialized, and experienced by citizens in everyday life.
Tax provides citizens with a means to conceptualize their responsibilities and rights vis-à-vis the state as well as each other (Guano 2010), making it a matter of both politics and moral economy. Studying the setting, collection, and evasion of taxes can therefore shed light not only on the particular relations between capital, class, and the state, but on the particular ways in which these relations are embedded in the vernacular imagination.
We are interested in submissions that problematize state-society relations through the prism of taxes.
How do citizens interpret state efforts to collect taxes and instill other forms of fiscal discipline?
How do state actors use tax enforcement to superimpose their expectations of citizen behavior, and conversely, what tax-related strategies do citizens employ to voice expectations of the state?
What values and assumptions are embedded in reforms and the modes of resisting them? How do communities coordinate 'fiscal disobedience' (Roitman 2005) in their attempts to circumvent what they perceive as unjust reforms?
What new cleavages may emerge from reforms as states harmonize financial systems with international norms, curb fiscal misdemeanors, and draw populations into combating tax evasion and fraud?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Olly Owen (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
Benue State's reintroduction of tax in a largely agrarian region after 30 years requires the state to re-negotiate terms of entry with limited credibility or coercive leverage. This exposes a public conversation about trust, legitimacy and how publics find it advantageous to engage with government.
Paper long abstract:
Benue State is a largely agrarian region, increasingly unable to survive on its share of Nigeria's oil wealth, and like many other states looking to domestic taxation to solve its financial difficulties. Reintroducing personal taxation after 30 years of neglect however requires the state to re-negotiate terms of entry where it possesses limited credibility or coercive leverage. This exposes a public conversation about trust, legitimacy and the ways in which publics find it advantageous to engage with government.
Debates around high taxes and governmental failures reveal that rural publics acknowledge the right of government to tax at the same time as experiencing its very evident material shortcomings, which force communities to rely on self-help social services. Yet, while taxation literature suggests that publics only slowly realise the material benefits of taxation by learning to bargain for greater access to services, fieldwork reveals that communities may welcome tax registration as a promise of modernity and a sign of the state noticing their existence. Formalisation is thus an instalment in trust and a statement of hope for future statebuilding.
Beyond that, however, popular understandings of government's right to tax, and of taxpayers' rights, are built on historical foundations which saw tax payment constitutive of social status, adulthood and gender, thus serving purposes beyond the material. This cultural memory of taxation both acknowledges coercive government and appropriates it for purposes of voice and self-validation. Thus, this study highlights how (re)formalisation processes involve not just negotiating material relationships, but also reconstituting the public sphere.
Miranda Sheild Johansson (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the barriers to fiscal expansion in Bolivia. It demonstrates how a significant hurdle lies not with the unwilling taxpayers, but rather with a complex set of barriers that are produced by the local government and economy.
Paper long abstract:
The story we often hear about taxes is one of nation−states attempting to collect them and populations responding to this demand by either fulfilling their fiscal 'obligations', or making efforts to avoid them. Ethnographic data collected in the peri−urban areas of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, populated mainly by recent, 'indigenous' migrants from the rural areas, describes a more complex reality. Here, the national taxes collected by the central tax office (SIN) are indeed evaded by this job insecure, low-income population. However, municipal taxes are something that they are eager to pay and save up for, but due a range of bureaucratic and socio-economic reasons are regularly obstructed from paying. While the national taxation scheme in Bolivia is an exchange of money derived from labour, capital, and trade, for services; municipal taxes are an exchange of cash (based on capital) for rights - the right to work, live, have recourse to the law, and be designated part of the 'official' city. As a result of their fiscal exclusion, these denied taxpayers of Cochabamba are unable to engage in society as 'full citizens'. This is something that does not sit well with the government's visions of a fiscal future ostensibly predicated on broad inclusion and indigenous notions of moral exchange and solidarity. This paper moves away from simplistic assumptions regarding the barriers to fiscal expansion, such as the unwillingness of people to pay, to a more nuanced discussion of the various forms of exchanges implied within a fiscal system.
Lotta Björklund Larsen (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
Why do people pay tax? And why do they avoid doing so? A fiscal anthropological approach to taxation means thinking about taxes as making social relations. Tax collection in practice thus has an impact on how taxpayers view their relationship with the state and ultimately with other citizens.
Paper long abstract:
Why do people pay tax? And why do they avoid doing so? A fiscal anthropological approach to taxation means thinking about taxes as making social relations. Taxes finance governmental infrastructure, defence and service to its citizen's; in many welfare countries do taxes make up one citizen's largest, if not THE largest, economic relation to anybody. Viewing taxes as citizen's explicit economic relation to the state and implicit relation to all other compatriots brings us straight into the core of economic anthropology. All citizens (supposedly) pay taxes and all (supposedly) benefit from living in a welfare state. In this light, tax collection in practice has an impact on how taxpayers view their relationship with the state and ultimately with other citizens. This is a holistic view on taxation, a view that intimately connects the spheres we call economy and society (cf. Maurer 2005b). Focus thus changes from legal explanations and economic quantifications to the type of reciprocal relations taxes and tax collection entail. As John Locke has already stated - taxes get into issues about democracy and reciprocity.
If you recognize that an economy is based on reciprocity, you will never be quits (Thomas 1991). The more things circulate, the more they will be connected. In this presentation I look at taxation this way. Not only as a one-way obligatory financial charge imposed upon a citizen by a state but as a payment that creates expectations on the state: on infra-structure, on services, on welfare, on security.
Vinzenz Baumer Escobar (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a Catalonian Cooperative that developed an alternative tax regime in crisis-ridden Spain, this paper will examine how formalized tax-evasion strategies can, somewhat paradoxically, result in state effects or the sensation of reproducing the state.
Paper long abstract:
Contesting the legitimacy of the Spanish state in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, several activist groups are promoting civil disobedience and so called desobedienca económica (economic disobedience) which involves, among other things, tax evasion. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative that, using a legal loophole in the Catalonian law, set up an employment system that allowed people to use the cooperative's fiscal structure to make invoices in exchange for a trimestral fee, instead of paying the steep self-employment taxes required by the state. These trimestral fees were subsequently used for commonly defined purposes. In this sense, we therefore see a formalized way of tax-evasion through the strategic use of state devices and even the creation of an alternative tax regime.
Previous studies have theorized the relation between state and civil society through taxes, showing how tax evasion can be a widespread socially embedded practice that questions the legitimacy of the state. Yet less attention has been paid to how tax-evasion can itself produce state-effects. Indeed, by promoting fiscal disobedience, the Cooperative ended up engaging in state-like activities such as the collection of trimestral fees (tax collection if you will) and the imposition of fiscal discipline. The members of the Cooperative, on their part, felt like they were indeed unwillingly reproducing the state. By analyzing these imaginations and identifications of the boundary of the state, this paper will shed light on the shifting relation between state, society, and economy in contemporary Southern-Europe.
Dora-Olivia Vicol (Queen Mary University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with self-employed migrants,this paper theorises taxation as an intersection of agency and coercive structure, where the ability to fashion oneself morally, as a contributing subject, is informed by the ability to navigate an increasingly digitised bureaucracy.
Paper long abstract:
In states built on a narrative of freedom, where good government is small government, and self-reliance reigns supreme, self-employment is the quintessential configuration of liberal citizenship. Premised on self-management, on control over one's labour rather than work rights, and on personal accountancy rather than payslips, it constitutes the fiscal counterpart of the enterprising self.
This paper proposes a critical theory of self-accountancy. Drawing on fieldwork with Romanian migrants to London, I argue that the fabled entrepreneurship of migrant subjectivity was fashioned, to a large extent, by coercive immigration controls. For many of my informants, becoming self-employed was not a pursuit of independent business, but a means of engineering the legality of their stay in the UK, and of gaining access to the protections granted only to tax contributing citizens. To be a tax payer, in other words, was to secure oneself. This securitisation was, in turn, a highly mediated performance.
The paper concludes by drawing attention to the complex infrastructures which mediated, and at times confounded, the practice of self-accountancy: the invoices and receipts, the digital platforms and phone robots, which interceded with my informants' ability to pay tax, and pushed many into the hands of paid-for consultants. In drawing attention to the political economic constitution and everyday enactment of self-accountancy then, this paper theorises taxation as an intersection of agency and coercive structure, where the ability to fashion oneself morally, as a contributing subject, is informed by the ability to navigate a particular bureaucracy.