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- Convenors:
-
Charles Dolph
(University College London)
Miranda Sheild Johansson (University College London)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores fiscal flows as an object of study and pathway to critical disciplinary reflection. Looking at the politics of redistribution, the panel poses questions about the movement of resources and its effects in society and for anthropological inquiry.
Long Abstract:
Inspired by this year’s theme of ‘Critical Junctions’, this panel posits ‘fiscal flows’ as an object of study and as a site for re-thinking areas of anthropological interrogation such as the state, debt and credit, inequalities, nation-making, and everyday life. Fiscal flows encompass both the payment of taxes as well as myriad forms of redistribution and expenditure. As such, fiscal flows themselves are generative of critical junctions in economic, political, and social life—pulling together and channelling the movement of resources, wealth, and power, and directing anthropological attention to such traffic.
We invite papers that explore all aspects of fiscal flows and how they produce society, including but not limited to: taxes, benefits, public spending, redistribution, and monetary and fiscal policy.
Questions pertinent to a discussion of fiscal flows include:
Who is seen to pay for whom and, conversely, to benefit? What moral/ethical evaluations are attached to fiscal obligation and expenditure?
What are the effects of fiscal flows on individual subjects and social collectivities, from the household to transnational?
How does the fiscal figure in projects of governance, social movements, political contestation, etc?
Where might fiscal flows encounter entanglements and blockages, and with what effects?
How can attention to fiscal flows generate sites of ethnographic intervention and disciplinary reflection?
Taking fiscal flows as a point of departure, this panel aims to open up new anthropological horizons and thematic linkages, and create critical space for re-considering the discipline’s engagements with policy, social movements, and other political actors within and beyond academia.
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
Disaster relief, development aid, and fictitious commodities: this paper looks into the ways in which mangrove seedlings act as tokens of public money in rural Fiji, and as units of international carbon offset compensations for the Fijian government.
Paper long abstract:
The Fijian government has recently turned mangrove seedlings into a lucrative commodity. In early 2024, numerous rural communities were still trying to come to terms with the fact that this previously useless plant promised to be worth more money than most traditional food crops. At the same time, the Fijian government was also spending money on creating mangrove-reliant livelihoods, from honeybees to fish and shrimp pools, and on planting mangroves to strengthen Fiji’s coastlines against hurricanes and erosion. The common denominator, besides the versatile properties of the mangrove plant, is Fiji’s ambition to increase the country’s contribution for global carbon trading, which the country hoped to join in 2024. In my paper, I examine the combination of commodification-as-redistribution and regional subsidisation using the medium of mangroves, to highlight the particular logic that follows from the Clean Development Mechanism implemented in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. In a nutshell: what a country trades at the international market has to be “additional” to its own naturally-occurring offset capacity.
Paper short abstract:
Across the river from N’Djamena, Chad’s capital, the Cameroonian town of Kousseri offers a singular case to explore the tensions between central and local governments around revenue collection and expenditure during a nationwide process of fiscal decentralization
Paper long abstract:
The town of Kousseri is separated from N’Djamena by the confluence of the Chari and the Logone rivers, which serve as the international boundary between Cameroon and Chad. In the shadow of the Chad’s capital, Kousseri’s economy is highly reliant on international trade and transport. Building on intermittent fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2023, the paper reconstructs the contours of revenue collection in the last decade and juxtaposes the central and local governments’ fiscal practices throughout a period when nationwide Cameroon was supposed to be embarking into a process of decentralization. This has also been a time marked by high volatility in levels of economic activity in Kousseri associated with sustained insecurity in neighbouring Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, the extreme degradation of the road network and the shorter-lived border closures imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a place where municipal authorities began to be elected only three decades ago but where many residents see themselves as citizens of a (local) republic within the (national) republic, the tensions between central and local government revenue collection and expenditure lead to the distinct dynamics I set out to explore.
Paper short abstract:
Direct taxes are good for civic growth and democratic politics. However in India, the world’s largest democracy and fourth largest economy, it is indirect taxes rather than direct taxes that have increased. What are the implications for its politics?
Paper long abstract:
India, the world’s largest democracy and fourth largest economy, relies on indirect taxes, rather than direct taxes, for its tax revenue. The current contribution of direct taxes to its Gross Tax Revenue (GTR) has fallen nearly 5% and indirect taxes have steadily risen to the current figure of 45% of GTR in 2024. Scholarship on the interlinkages between democratic politics and taxation policy however show that direct taxes are better for civic growth and democratic politics. What does impact does India's dominant indirect tax regime thus have on its democratic politics?
Based on fieldwork conducted with Dr. Pavithra Suryanarayan (LSE Government) new research investigates the impact of a major new indirect tax introduced in 2017, the national Goods and Services Tax (GST) on business and politics. The introduction of GST created new flows of taxation of business payments to an automated central digital platform (GSTN) and a centralised GST council, replacing a more personalised previous system of interactions with federal bureaucrats and other businesses.
This paper will investigate how GST has created new individual and social subjectivities about taxation, the social contract, the ‘ease of doing business’ and a new anti-federal taxation system - and their impact on democratic politics.
Paper short abstract:
The Labour government's new budget marks a 'critical junction' in UK public finances. This paper unpacks the reorientation of fiscal flows from austerity to borrowing and investment, sketching possible directions of anthropological analysis of this critical junction.
Paper long abstract:
Taking a cue from this year’s conference theme, this paper considers the release of the first Labour budget in fourteen years as marking a ‘critical junction’ in UK public finances. In October 2024, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves presented the Labour government’s budget as a stark departure from nearly a decade and a half of Tory-administered fiscal austerity. Promising an economic growth-based approach to rebuilding Britain’s public services and raising living standards, she remarked that the only way to achieve this ‘is to invest, invest, invest.’ While a rise in employer contributions to national insurance represents the main source of increased tax revenue, crucial to the shift from austerity to investment is the relaxation of fiscal rules that opens new paths to government borrowing for long-term infrastructure projects (but not day-to-day spending). Specifically, Reeves confirmed at the IMF annual meeting in Washington, D.C. a new method for assessing the UK’s debt position which takes into account government assets in addition to liabilities. As fiscal flows are thus reoriented not only by tax rises but around borrowing and investment, this paper begins to sketch some possible directions for anthropological analysis of this critical junction in UK public finances.
Paper short abstract:
The digitalisation of fiscal flows in Bangladesh generates a data deluge that runs countercurrent to money's movements. This paper explores the sociopolitical stakes, ethical conundrums, and material consequences of these new citizen-state digital fiscal data relations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between countercurrent flows of money and data in three newly digitalised systems in Bangladesh: local-level holding tax collection, social safety net programmes, and land management systems. It asks how data collection and digital transformation are reshaping citizen-state relationships and financial processes in everyday life. The paper will explore tax, benefits, and land management through three lenses:
1) Infrastructural labour: Personal efforts and interests undergird the maintenance of digital fiscal systems, including who becomes in/excluded and how data is 'cooked' by gatekeepers and intermediaries to capture flows of value.
2) Ethical life: Data relations invoke concerns about trust, privacy, judgment, and obligation. These issues go beyond industry attention to data ‘purity’ (a fiction) and ‘safe’ storage to relations of data/money collection and control. Digitalisation engages local ethical registers to spin webs of generative/extractive obligations characterised by the nature of communities' role in data arrangements.
3) Materiality and value: Value judgments arise when encountering enduring frictions between social knowledge, paper data and digital data. Digitalisation choices entail the confrontation of violent legacies, e.g. of colonial exclusions and how sociopolitical categories affect people’s possibilities.
Paper short abstract:
Kenyan fiscal policies have increasingly tapped into and been mediated by digital financial services and technologies. Entanglements between the fiscal and the digital have given way to a pervasive and self-fulfilling anti-fraud moral panic that amplifies interpersonal and institutional mistrust.
Paper long abstract:
In Kenya, digital financial services have increasingly taken centre stage in fiscal policies over the past decade. The Kenyan Treasury has repeatedly hiked taxes on SIM-card-based mobile money transfers as well as digital payment and lending services. This fiscal regime has contributed to widespread economic insecurity and immiseration. It has also redefined popular conceptions of ‘the digital’ by foregrounding how digital financial technologies entwine and impose state and corporate interests at ordinary citizens’ expense. Here, ‘fiscal disobedience’ (Roitman 2005) and ‘fiscal workarounds’ (Magale and Schmidt 2024) involve more than disengaging digital financial technologies and relying on informal networks and cash-based flows. Some fintech users covertly situate themselves within formal fiscal-digital flows to defraud others – including friends and family – or to track and seize government welfare and pension payments distributed via digital channels. That said, fintech fraud remains rare, contained within specific sites (e.g., maximum security prisons), and outwardly oriented towards Europe and America. Nevertheless, anti-fraud discourses are ubiquitous. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with scammers, human ATMs and mobile money agents, as well as fintech users and their families, this paper explores how this pervasive anti-fraud moral panic is re-shaping increasingly digitized fiscal flows. The resulting blockages and entanglements, many of which reflect the technocratic politics of transparency and authentication dominant in the global tech industry, are pushing people into fintech fraud and generating ‘fraudsters’ while amplifying citizen mistrust in state institutions, user mistrust in telecom companies and financial institutions, and interpersonal suspicions of fraud in family life.
Paper short abstract:
I show how the fiscal flows of the 'millennial city' of Gurgaon, India, manifest as a gendered substance of kinship tied to gendered roles, obligations, and relations. I analyze women's intimate speculations about money and kinship, amidst the broader speculative urbanism of the city.
Paper long abstract:
Gurgaon, India has seen spectacular urbanisation in the last two decades, with private capital transforming the city from an agrarian hinterland to India’s ‘millennial city’. This has meant a massive influx of money and people, and the creation of new avenues of work, consumerism, and leisure. Money is present in its seeming abundance in the city, part of its ‘urban metabolic rift'. At the same time, it remains elusive and mercurial in that it is hard to acquire and fast finishing for most. While the urban economy has been variously studied with attention to its ever-expanding capitalistic frontiers of investment, employment and spending, I trace how the fiscal flows of the city manifest within the home as a deeply gendered substance of kinship tied to gendered roles, obligations, and relations. Taking the family as my starting point -- with its structural constraints, affective entanglements and relations of interdependence -- I study how the fiscal flows, mis-flows and un-flows of wage, rent, financial assets, income, savings or expenditures become crucial plot points around which 'family dramas' congeal, animating familial anxieties, ambitions and attachments, and oftentimes reorganizing the family structures and gender roles. Following the lives of four women living at the margins of the city, I trace how they engage in intimate speculations about money and kinship futures dependent on the flows and blockages of money in the home amidst the larger speculative urbanism of Gurgaon, to renegotiate belonging within the home.
Paper short abstract:
Collective investment is a popular way for Swedish pensioners today to describe the building of the Swedish welfare state. However, increasing national inequality leads many to ask if their embrace of an investment imaginary disabled redistributive arguments with consequences only now unfolding.
Paper long abstract:
Imaginaries around fiscal flows and how they related to issues of ideologies and the everyday are key to any tax system’s political and popular success. Based on ethnographic research with pensioners in Sweden, this paper explores ideas of how fiscal flows produce society and the individual taxpayer’s part in this. The research participants, all young during the building of the Swedish welfare state, the so called ‘people’s home’ (folkhemmet) in the 40s and 50s, shared a discourse about taxpayment in the twentieth century as being about building a new Sweden together, an act of collective investment. Notably this investment narrative was a societal move away from earlier calls by worker’s movements for redistribution. However, while investment had been key to the fiscal imaginary of my research participants’ working lives, they expressed concern for growing inequalities in contemporary Sweden, the tax system’s inability to redistribute effectively, and ‘investment’ as a failed type of fiscal flow. Investment narratives were simultaneously seen as key to building Swedish welfare and central to the bit-by-bit dismantling of fiscal measures aimed at redistribution.