Social Analysis

This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between state and citizen while examining the limits of social contract thinking. Focusing on how citizens interpret and react to state efforts to promote fiscal citizenship, it sheds light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems. The contributors use tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. They also highlight how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state in the form of alternative religious and economic communities.

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.

Middle-class Christians in Ghana's capital Accra voice ambivalence about paying taxes: some claim that the government wastes their hard-earned money, while others consider taxes a Christian duty enshrined in the scripture. By contrast, most Christians in Accra esteem tithes to churches as contributions that yield infrastructural ‘development’ and divine favor. Drawing on the explicit comparisons that Ghanaian Christians make between the benefits of paying taxes vis-à-vis paying tithes, this article argues that taxes exist as part of a wider conceptual universe of monetary transfers. The efficacy of such transfers is evaluated in relation to what I call a ‘rightful return’. The unveiling of tithes as the counterpoint to taxes ultimately elicits an emergent Ghanaian conception of the public good between the state and God's Kingdom.

This article challenges the seemingly inseparable conceptual link between tax and the state by drawing on fieldwork carried out with an anti-capitalist cooperative in Barcelona, where tax evasion went hand in hand with the pooling of common monetary resources used for the creation of semi-public goods managed by non-state actors. Drawing on theoretical insights from the commons, I will put forward the concept of the ‘fiscal commons’ in order to decenter tax as an analytic for making sense of the relation between the state and civil society. In so doing, I will argue that taxes are part of a broader repertoire of financial contributions that people draw on to actively create different fiscal commons that operate alongside and in relation to the state's tax regime.

This article investigates how Istrian business owners challenged the Croatian government's motivation for and enforcement of fiskalizacija, an automated VAT reform adopted in 2013 as Croatia prepared for EU membership. Fiskalizacija threatened local economic agency and sowed distrust in government. The analysis of this tax reform demonstrates how Istrians envisage their economic agency, rights, and responsibilities. I argue that it is not just the construction of fiscal systems, but how such a system is projected onto society that is fundamental to the development of state-society relations. The way in which a tax reform is put into effect, including the enforcement practices of state agents, shapes how citizens perceive the social contract to be constituted by fiscal regimes.

This article builds on observations of self-employed Romanian migrants and their encounters with UK fiscal obligations to position tax as a distinct node in the worker-citizen nexus. Speaking to anthropological critiques of neoliberalism, I argue that economic activity is not merely the ethical imperative of a political order premised on self-reliance. It is also a practical test of migrants’ abilities to translate the moral capital of ‘hard work’ into the categories and bureaucracy of fiscal contribution. Analyzing migrants’ compliance with immigration controls and fiscal regimes, seen as a duty to ‘account for oneself’ in moral and financial terms, this article theorizes tax returns as a key junction in the worker-citizen nexus—one that can allow migrants into, but also confine them to the margins of, European citizenship.

Taxation always involves an element of value quantification, since to tax is also to implement a measuring scale—a process that is usually taken for granted. But when it becomes necessary to determine the taxational value of abstract time or labor, it is also necessary to outline the principles upon which such value is established. This article discusses the conflicting views of the Finnish Tax Administration and the Helsinki Timebank, a local exchange network, about how to tax ‘whiles’, the community currency that equates to one-hour stretches of work time. Based on a 2013 ruling by the Finnish tax authority and the Timebank's responses to it, the article asks, to what degree can the choice of a particular ‘standard’ be taken as a ‘moral’ choice?

Placing the anthropology of tax and taxation in conversation with the anthropology of ethics yields productive insights into both subfields. This is because discussions and disputations about tax and taxation reveal the ways in which people articulate and evaluate their relations with others, with the state, with ‘ought’ and ‘is’, and in terms of ownership and responsibility. They open up the complex relationship between legal obligations construed as moral and ethical understandings that are grounded in reflection and seek to articulate and enact particular understandings of the ‘good’ and ‘right’. This afterword draws on my own research with English right-wing activists, the articles that make up this special issue, and key discussions in the anthropology of ethics.