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Paper Short Abstract

Fiscal data has a social life that shapes citizen-state relations. This paper explores a social enterprise's intervention to digitalise one local authority's holding tax systems, revealing data practices as key sites where citizens and officials negotiate power and value.

Paper Abstract

This article examines how the social life of fiscal data shapes citizen-state relations through an ethnographic study of a social enterprise’s intervention in local tax collection in rural Bangladesh. Drawing on theories of fiscal sociality and data infrastructures as sociotechnical systems, it shows how notions of trust, reciprocity, and accountability (or their opposites) emerge through ongoing interactions with and through data. It argues that data practices are not merely technical processes but sites where citizens and officials actively negotiate power, value, and social relations. Following data's trajectory—from its contested creation and private storage to its insertion into wider relations—reveals how participants in fiscal data systems weave new forms of extractive and generative state-citizen relations.

Paying attention to data illuminates aspects of citizen-state relations that might otherwise remain invisible: how trust is understood through volunteers' relational tactics in data collection; how resistance to sharing information reflects deeper concerns about redistributive claims; and how ‘pure’ data is imagined to emerge from social relations rather than technical systems. These practices show how fiscal data become entangled with existing social relations while simultaneously transforming them, offering a contribution to anthropological understandings of fiscal sociality by showing how local actors actively shape data infrastructures in their efforts to negotiate state-society relations.