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.