Taxing the indigenous: a history of barriers to fiscal inclusion in the Bolivian highlands

Abstract

Following the electoral success of left wing and pro-indigenous President Evo Morales, the indigenous poor in Bolivia find themselves at the centre of a new vision of the state, echoed by a fervent citizenship project to include them as contributing participants in this new Bolivia. The state is working to initiate these hitherto informally employed subjects into an individualised fiscal regime: to make them into "taxpayers." While the highland indigenous population have supported Morales' political project, they resist inclusion into the broader statesponsored project. This is not simply about avoiding financial obligations; their resistance is instead firmly rooted in the historical experience of fiscal exploitation, general suspicion of any state-run scheme as well as a clash of exchange models. I argue that in order to overcome these barriers, the Tax Office has to succeed in separating fiscal expansion from its association with an abstract state concept, and instead link it to palpable everyday life and politics, such as the union structure and Morales' project of indigenous inclusion.

Geography and indigeneity III: Co-articulation of colonialism and capitalism in indigeneity’s economies

“…However, that situation is rapidly changing, with diversifying Indigenous economic activities and states’ fiscal imperatives to stabilize public finances (e.g. Sheild Johansson, 2018). As in the case of economic relations described above, taxation reveals the frictions between Indigenous self-representation and politics and hegemonic representations of indigeneity.…”

Taxes, taxpayers, and settler colonialism: Toward a critical fiscal sociology of tax as white property

“…Tax and taxation has recently experienced a long rebound from early fiscal sociology (Goldscheid, 1958;Schumpeter, 1991Schumpeter, [1919) back into the empirical and theoretical terrain of sociology (Martin, 2008;Martin et al, 2009;Newman & O'Brien, 2011;Williamson, 2017;Zhang, 2020) amid existing and longstanding analysis of tax in disciplines such as law (Brown, 2007;Likhovski, 2007), and growing attention paid in geography (Tapp & Kay, 2019), history (Heaman, 2013(Heaman, , 2017Ogle, 2020;Tillotson, 2017), andanthropology (Björklund Larsen, 2017;Makovicky & Smith, 2020;Sheild Johansson, 2018;. Fiscal sociologists have demonstrated that taxes and tax policies have the capacity to exacerbate and institutionalize inequalities (Martin, 2006;Martin & Prasad, 2014).…”

God's Delivery State

“…Further, what are taxes intended to work toward, from the perspective of both state authorities and citizens who contribute to and seek rightful returns from collective pools of revenue? As anthropologists of taxation have persuasively shown, what citizens expect to materialize through taxes can greatly vary from the fiscal outcomes promoted by the state (Peebles 2012;Roitman 2007;Sheild Johansson 2018). The rightful return helps to focus analytical attention on the broader universe of transfers of which taxes are a part, unraveling a parallel dimension to tax evasion and fiscal disobedience.…”