Taxes for Independence

Abstract

In peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia, the ‘informally’ employed population reject the government’s fiscal offer of taxes in return for welfare, infrastructure, and rights, including the offer’s underlying logic of reciprocity. Instead, they disaggregate the fiscal landscape by choosing to engage with some taxes and avoid others, understanding the exchanges that do take place as vehicles for independence from the state as opposed to interdependence with the state. An anthropology of tax must do the same: deconstruct fiscal systems, examine the multiple exchange logics at play, investigate the production of diverse forms of ‘economic citizenship’, and locate emic definitions of tax within their historical and cultural context. Specifically, reciprocity should not be assumed to be an organizing principle of fiscal imaginaries or realities.

A tax by any other name? Conceptions of taxation and implications for research

“…Critically, these biases tend to reflect state-centrism and Weberian institutional ideals. Researchers may believe the idea of taxation to be universal, but the reality of informal and pre-colonial institutions of public finance seriously challenges such assumptions derived from cultural premises and biases that infuse Northern conceptions thereof (Johansson 2020).…”

The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective

“…Loteadores often work at the margins of legality and land changes hands without the proper documentation to go with it (see also Goldstein, 2012: 90-94). When new owners attempt to enter their plot in the land registry, pay property tax, or apply for social housing, they often discover that they are not in possession of the correct paperwork and cannot easily prove legal ownership of the land (Sheild Johansson, 2020). The coproduction process thus demands a level of formality that does not exist in peri-urban zones, resulting in the exclusion of many households and/or bureaucratic battles that define people's lives for many years.…”

Distributed fiscal relations and their imaginaries: Metaphors of redistribution and reciprocity in struggles about distributive justice in Austria

“…This formulation of entangled economic transactions fits well with contemporary fiscal anthropology. Scholars such as Miranda Sheild Johansson (2020, 18) argue that neither modality of economic transaction should be assumed to be an organizing principle of fiscal realities. The interplay between modes of economic integration in the organization of contemporary capitalism ( fiscal relations ) should be analyzed as a material process accompanied by (but not necessarily congruent with) the kinds of concepts with which citizens, corporate managers, owners, courts, or government personnel operate ( fiscal imaginaries ).…”

“…The topic of wealth taxation in Austria demonstrates the importance of the history of fiscal technology, the political registers, and the situated contingencies of actors' constellations when reconstructing actually existing fiscal relations (Roitman, 2005; Sheild Johansson, 2020). They also shed light on how debates about various forms of redistribution co‐constitute fiscal relations (Makovicky & Smith, 2020, 3).…”