Anthropology and tax might not appear to fit together at first sight. Taxation is often considered a highly technical and numerical subject, more suitable for lawyers, accountants and economists than social anthropologists,–given their expertise and focus on local and marginalized communities and socio-cultural relations. It is therefore unsurprising that within the discipline of anthropology, taxation is a relatively less explored topic, despite the central role that tax plays in society and social theory. We wrote and edited, together with our contributors, «Anthropology and Tax. Ethnographies of Fiscal Relations», because we believe taxation is something anthropologists of the 21st century have to get their heads around, a topic that needs scrutiny. The discipline, as our volume shows, has the methodological and theoretical tools to «unearth the dramas» inherent in our, at times, utterly unexciting tax systems.
Questions of fiscal policies and tax are, after all, social, ethical, moral, and political ones. Taxes are embedded in socio-economic relations, cosmologies, and cultural contexts. They structure and shape social behaviour and, at the same time, taxes are themselves socially constructed, and thus shaped by society, its norms, values, fears, hopes, and desires. Taxes engage everyone, directly or indirectly, in systems of distribution and resource allocation. They affect who can demand what, when, and how, as well as why and from whom, and thus have the power to cement or change social inequalities. Taxes, however, do not only have an organising and financial side, but also a «productive» one. Tax policies determine imaginaries of wealth creators and contributors to society, of rigthtful recipients, but also of people who are considered a burden, who belong to «the unproductive».
«Anthropology and Tax» invites the reader to engage with fundamental questions such as: (1) «what are taxes, how are they defined and by whom?», (2) «what and who is taxable and how are they rendered so?», (3) «What do taxes do? How are they implicated in the histories and present of global and local equities and inequities, racisms and colonialism?». To answer these seemingly basic questions, the book forwards multiple perspectives from around the world about fiscal systems and how they are experienced and constituted. Our main contention is that asking and pursuing answers to these questions in an anthropological way will produce new and deeper understandings of tax, what fiscal systems do in our world, and what socialities taxes disable and enable.
We believe that an anthropological perspective on taxation that foregrounds the ambivalent relationship between tax and power, and the conditions in which tax systems can or cannot be used to change social order, is crucial at a moment in time when tax debates in many settings worldwide are intensifying. Humanitarian and ecological crisis, including climate shocks, pandemics, and wars, all – produce inequalities and unpredictabilities that are beyond most people›s control. The need to act collectively, and demands for state interventions will increase when the scarcity of resources, ecological catastrophes, and therefore distributional conflicts, accelerate. This volume, and an anthropological approach to tax more widely, makes incisive interventions in what is one of the central conversations of the century, that of fiscal sociality and possibility.
While many aspects of taxation might seem singularly unexciting, they are highly consequential. We began writing and editing Anthropology and Tax during the COVID-19 pandemic. The power of fiscal measures to make a notable difference in reducing COVID›s economic impact on peoples› livelihoods was then frequently experienced in many states. There was, however, also evidence that the ability to use fiscal policy to protect welfare during periods of crisis is limited in low and lower-middle-income countries. The World Bank›s Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report (2022) warned that the world is witnessing the largest setback to global poverty reduction since World War II. Since then, calls that demand a reform of institutions of global (re-)distribution are on the rise, including proposals for global wealth taxes. Simultaneously, we see desires to put nations first, undermining the possible spaces for global solutions, and a rising fear of the so-called deep state and libertarian demands for the downscaling of state institutions and concomitant regulation, including tax cuts. The different socialities that these different fiscal proposals would produce could not be more stark. Anthropology and Tax equips readers to participate in these global and local tax debates through exploring tax systems ethnographically, rather than normatively, tracking how these systems both shape and are shaped by politics and their socio-cultural contexts.
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