Journal of Legal Anthropology

What kind of phenomenon is it when ordinary people in the United Kingdom unexpectedly abide by government advice on social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, even anticipating constraints on their activities? These happenings demand that we engage anthropologically with compliance – acts or activities that conform, submit or adapt to rules or to the demands of others. At present, there is no ‘anthropology of compliance’. Rather, the discipline has inherited traditions of thought about compliance – as a necessary aspect of sociability or a morally suspect complicity, demanding resistance. These assumptions remain unexamined, but profoundly shape anthropological scholarship. This introduction aims to show how and why compliance might be a useful heuristic for anthropology. We define compliance as that set of means by which actors strive to accommodate themselves to others in their collective life. We argue that this conception of compliance allows us to multiply the kinds of phenomena we can call ‘political’. It allows us to think about the political constitution of ‘radical’ difference, but to avoid making people identical with their cultural or conceptual worlds. By showing what compliance is and how it operates in and on social life, we ought therefore to be able to recover both specific forms of suffering and inequality and the ways in which social lives are constitutively different.

Since 2006, the Rwandan government has been implementing policies to modernise the agricultural sector in a top-down manner. Small-scale subsistence farmers, making up the vast majority of Rwandans, are compelled to leave their traditional farming behind, form co-operatives and take up ‘modern’ farming techniques based on irrigation and state-approved crops. For my interlocutors in a Rwandan village, this policy resulted in reduced crop yields, difficulties in putting food on the table and a visible degradation of their lives. Yet people complied. They did not rise up in protest. They sought to meet the authorities’ demands. Although ‘government authoritarianism’ explains much of the lack of open resistance, Rwandans had their own ideas, values and practices which at times overlapped with oppressive state projects and ended up supporting the state's agricultural modernization scheme. Here, compliance is part of how villagers wanted to project themselves to others and to themselves and how they pursued their aspirations for the future.

Concerns about medical non-compliance have generated interest in the potential of remote, digital reminder and surveillance technologies. Amidst a devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic and outbreaks of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), compliance technologies are touted by developers and medical researchers as a solution to the ‘problem of non-compliance’. The appeal lies in the prospect of fashioning disciplined bodies, but at the cost of sacrificing the intimacy of care for technical expediency. Despite the growing popularity in global medicine to account for disease in terms of the ‘social determinants of health’, digital medical technologies reproduce discourses of health as an individual responsibility. I conducted research in a TB clinic in South Africa that experimented with an electronic reminder and monitoring device that sought to improve compliance to a new regimen of drugs for TB prevention. I found that patients embraced the apparatus through local framings of TB, and deployed it in their everyday struggles for care.

Taxation is central to the financing of most states, and monitoring that taxpayers comply with laws and regulations is a correspondingly important government activity. Governments have many ways to design tax systems, and no two national tax systems are the same. Hence, compliance strategies differ and so do outcomes. Complying with tax laws, beyond the fiscal aim of contributing revenue to a state, is multifaceted in a globalized world. Tax administrations struggle to control large multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) tax planning, avoidance and general evasion, whereas MNEs grapple with the problem of having to comply with widely divergent national tax systems. As a response, tax administrations, through membership organisations such as the OECD, invent forms of collaboration between tax administrations and MNEs—all with the goal of increasing tax compliance. One way they do this is through the co-operative compliance model. Here, we compare two compliance projects, based on this model, in Norway and Sweden to shed more light on what tax compliance is in practice. We elaborate on Valerie Braithwaite's seminal concept of tax compliance as a ‘dance’ between tax administrations and taxpayers. In so doing we underline the significance of paying attention to conceptions of time and space as critical elements of creating compliance in practice between tax administrations and MNEs.

Nearly all major corporations and many public agencies have established ethics and compliance departments, some of them as the result of penalties imposed by the US Department of Justice, others due to embarrassing scandals. The responsibilities of these departments range from inculcating codes of conduct and preventing bribery, to impeding litigation for harassment and bribes, or ensuring that government certifications and branch standards are followed. For the compliance officer, ethics breaches are not due to unethical persons, but inadequate compliance training. This article, based on fieldwork in compliance training conferences, anti-corruption events and readings of ethics and compliance manuals, describes how a ‘culture of compliance’ is pursued in organisations. In the wake of continuing ethics breaches, are these regimes genuine efforts to ‘do the right thing’, or simply a façade to improve firms’ reputations? Compliance can be both real and fake, and the compliance function must ensure where the latter is authentic and where it can be ignored.

During 1931, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown gave a popular talk at Columbia University in New York. He maintained that, unlike in the West, savage societies – a term commonly used at the time – had no criminal class and had succeeded in enforcing conformity to social norms. In this article, I suggest that, despite its defects, the talk highlights central themes in Radcliffe-Brown's thinking about conformity, social sanctions and the law. Drawing on archival sources and on published material, I show how during fieldwork he observed the brutalities of colonial rule in the Andaman Islands, Western Australia and South Africa. I suggest that a critical awareness of how colonial law served as an ally of conquest forms an important sub-text in Radcliffe-Brown's writing on the effective manner in which Andaman Islanders maintained social order, Indigenous Australians settled disputes and African courts operated. His comparative, sociological approach, which was implicitly critical of Western societies, was a vital influence in the emergence of law as a topic of anthropological enquiry.