果冻影院

The project 鈥楾he Sociality of Tax: A Multiperspective Study of Fiscal Relations (SocTax)鈥� is funded through a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (PI: Miranda Sheild Johansson) (Grant Ref: MR/V022261/1). The project runs from March 2022 to March 2026.

This project aims to understand the sociality of tax. Taking an innovative approach it investigates fiscal regimes in an anthropological fashion, exploring the types of social relations that paying and not paying tax produce, rather than focusing on fiscal compliance and or the macro and microeconomics of tax. It does this comparatively and cross-culturally: spanning multiple fieldsites, including neighbourhoods, workplaces, community groups, political interest groups and tax offices, and three fiscal systems鈥擝olivia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Crucially, the project will study tax systems as they are practiced within different cultural and historical contexts, as opposed to analyzing them as abstract economic models. This actor-centered perspective focused on sociality aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of what taxes are and do.

Objectives

1) To achieve evidence-based understanding of how paying and not paying tax shapes听sociality: relations of belonging, exclusion, equality, care and reciprocity.

2) To radically expand fiscal studies by employing an anthropologically-grounded approach for the study of tax as a producer of sociality. The focus will be placed both on how social relations are influenced and created through tax policy and practice, and how popular fiscal perceptions and activities in turn shape these same fiscal structures and policy. This will contribute to wider understandings of how policy and society interact and co-constitute each other.

3) To created a new field of study鈥斺�榯he anthropology of tax鈥�, and further develop听established anthropological concerns with state-society relations, policy, bureaucracy,听citizenship, money and debt.

4) To intervene in public and policy debates around taxes, redistribution, inequality, social听exclusion, the digital economy, and financial welfare, and contribute with crucial knowledge听of the social effects of fiscal systems.

People

Miranda Sheild Johansson

is the PI of the project. She is working across all three sites, Bolivia, the UK, and Sweden. Miranda has worked in highland Bolivia since 2007 and has been working on taxes in the region since 2017. Her work on the anthropology of tax include: indigenous perspectives on tax, decolonising tax, statecraft in Latin America, the relationship between 鈥榝ormal鈥� and 鈥榠nformal鈥� money flows, fiscal exchange logics, and the social contract. Miranda鈥檚 Leverhulme project, 鈥楤ecoming a Tax Payer: Fiscal Expansion and Economic Subjectivities in Bolivia鈥�, explored the experiences of recent rural-to-urban migrants in highland Bolivia as they encounter and make sense of expanding national tax structures into which they are being incorporated. Her earlier work has focused on agricultural labour and the value of transformation in the Bolivian Andes.

Charles Dolph

Charles is a cultural anthropologist with research foci on agrarian dynamics, taxation, contraband, and money and value in the Southern Cone and Andes of South America. His doctoral thesis, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, examined the cultural politics of the U.S. dollar in Argentina in light of the country's agrarian transformation and experience with a global soy boom. After defending his thesis, titled 'The Cultural Battle Against the Dollar: Struggles over Hoarding and Democracy in the Twilight of Argentina's Soy Boom' at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in 2022, he joined 果冻影院 as part of the UKRI-funded 'Sociality of tax' project led by Miranda Sheild Johansson. For this comparative project of fiscal systems and relations across Sweden, the U.K., and Bolivia, he has conducted ethnographic research in Bolivia on a new wealth tax introduced in the country as well as on contraband economies and financialization in the Bolivia-Argentina borderlands.

Max Zahnd

Maximilien (Max) Zahnd is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex. In 2023, he joined 果冻影院 and the UKRI-funded 鈥淪ociality of Tax鈥� (SocTax) project鈥攍ed by Miranda Sheild Johansson鈥攁s a postdoctoral research fellow. His research explores the relationship between tax, Indigenous sovereignty, and settler colonialism in North America. Using contemporary and historical case studies in Alaska, he examines the ways tax can help colonization unfold and how Native communities use tax to fight back against settler colonialism. His work has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and Society and Space.

Within the remit of the 鈥淪ociality of Tax鈥� project, Max looks at the geography of local tax laws and policies in British-occupied Martinique during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Max is also interested in the relationship between tax, space, and culture in the UK countryside.

听

Project activities听

Fieldwork/archival work

Miranda Sheild Johansson: In Cochabamba, Bolivia听January to May 2024; Stockholm, Sweden January 鈥� December 2023; UK January- December 2024

Charles Dolph: La Paz and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, January to June 2023; UK, January 鈥� December 2024.

Max Zahnd: Archival research in Martinique (Archives D茅partementales, Fort-de-France) and Kew (London) (UK National Archives), Summer and Autumn 2023. FW UK January 鈥� December 2024.听

Networks

, 2022. Miranda Sheild Johansson co-founder and convenor. Charles Dolph and Max Zahnd听- members.

Max Zahnd: Co-convenor of the 鈥淓mpire, Colonialism and Law鈥� stream for the Socio-Legal Studies Association鈥檚 annual meetings (2024, 2025, and 2026)

Max Zahnd: Member of the UArctic Thematic Network on Critical Arctic studies (CAS)

Active members of the

Workshops and conference panels

(Co-Organiser with Soumhya Venkatesan) 鈥楾he Anthropology of Tax鈥�, 3-day workshop funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation听 ($19,920). Bringing together fourteen anthropologists from around the globe working on tax. Buxton, Manchester, April 2022

鈥楲a Socialidad de los Impuestos: Un Estudio Multiperspectivo de las Relaciones Fiscales鈥�. CIDES-UMSA Postgraduate Institute of Development Studies. Bringing together Bolivian and Peruviuan scholars working on state society relations to discuss the sociality of tax. La Paz, Bolivia, 17 Abril 2023

AAA Panel: Tax transformations: Fiscal technologies of transfer, categorization, and conversion. American Anthropological Association meeting 2023.
Chair: Horacio Ortiz, Associate Professor at East China Normal University, Researcher at CNRS
Discussant: Justin Richland, Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UC Irvine
Papers:听
Remote Yet Colonized: Rurality, Indigeneity, and the Evolving Functions of the Alaska Net Income Tax, 1949 鈥� 1980, Maximilien Zahnd
Tax Units as World-Making (Fiji), Matti Er盲saari
Charitable Purpose as a Political, Regulatory Frame in India, Erica Bornstein
Fiscal grievances: taxes, education, and race in the forging of Bolivian regionalism, Charles Dolph
Tax Arbitrage and Planetary Justice: Political Visions of State Territory in Guinean Mining Agreement Negotiations. Gustav Kalm
Shaping care and debt through taxes: The individualisation of fiscal subjectivity in Sweden. Miranda Sheild Johansson

Max Zahnd: Presented 鈥淩emote Yet Colonized: Rurality, Indigeneity, and the Evolving Functions of the Alaska Net Income Tax, 1949 鈥� 1980 at the Annual Tax Research Network Conference (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK) and at the Annual Conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, Ulster University, Derry/Londonderry, UK

Max Zahnd: Presented 鈥淗ow Can Tribal Taxation Complicate the US Supreme Court鈥檚 Understanding of Indigeneity, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Settler Colonialism?鈥� at the workshop 鈥淛udicial Constructions of Historical Consciousness: Legal Politics of Identity and Hate in the Postcolony鈥� (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK) (invited) (workshop organized by Sandhya Fuchs and Tobias Kelly)

Talks

Miranda Sheild Johansson. (Invited)鈥楥omplying in the 鈥榬ight鈥� way: Competing fiscal rationales in highland Bolivia and the problem of 鈥榗ompliance鈥� in tax studies. 鈥�'Entrepreneurship and Prosperity in Extreme Contexts' Soundbites and Director's Seminar series 06/10/2022, Institute of Global Prosperity

Miranda Sheild Johansson (Invited) 鈥楲and management in peri-urban Bolivia鈥�. Workshop: Promises and Pitfalls of Collective Property for Sustainable Urban Development, The Bartlett & Development Planning Unit (DPU), 果冻影院 16/08/2022:

Miranda Sheild Johansson (Invited) 鈥楾he problems with simplification: Perspectives on digitalisation and presumptive taxation regimes amongst low-income groups in Bolivia鈥�. Taxpayer Rights 7^th International Conference, Harvard Law School, 20/05/2022

Charles Dolph (Invited) 鈥楳alestar fiscal鈥�: La socialidad del impuesto en Bolivia.鈥� Higher University of San Andr茅s, Faculty of Law, 15/05/23

Max Zahnd: 鈥淔ighting Back with Taxes: Indigenous Peoples, Counter-Mapping, and the Promises of Decolonial Taxation,鈥� Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society (Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands) (invited)听

Publications

Dolph, Charles. 2023. 鈥溌縀stamos Saliendo Adelante? Assessing Bolivia鈥檚 Macroeconomic Stability.鈥� North American Congress on Latin America. March 16, 2023.

Sheild鈥圝ohansson, M. (2023) 鈥樷�楥omplying in the 鈥榬ight鈥� way: Competing fiscal rationales in highland Bolivia and the problem of 鈥榗ompliance鈥� in tax studies.鈥� Compliance: cultures and networks of submission. Editors W. Rollason & Eric Hirsch. Berghahn Press (Legal Anthropology series).

Sheild Johansson, Miranda; (2023) Taxes for Independence: Rejecting a Fiscal Model of Reciprocity in Peri-urban Bolivia. In: Makovicky, Nicolette and Smith, Robin, (eds.) Beyond the Social Contract: An Anthropology of Tax. (pp. 18-37). Berghahn Books: New York, NY, USA.

Shield Johansson, M (2022). 'From "Beasts of Burden" to "Backbone of Society": The Fiscal Forging of a Bolivian Middle Class. 'Special Issue: Engineering the new middle classes: State institutions and the aspirations of citizenship (Eds M. Bolt & J. Schubert). Critique of Anthropology, 42(4),381-399.

Burnyeat, G., & Sheild Johansson, M. (2022). 鈥楢n anthropology of the social contract: The political power of an idea鈥�. Critique of Anthropology, 42(3), 221鈥�237.

Zahnd, Maximilien. 2023. 鈥淎n Alaska Tax Story: Tribal Sovereignty, Settler Colonialism, and the Indigenous Tax Space.鈥� Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41(5): 784鈥�804.

Zahnd, Maximilien. 2023. 鈥淣ot 鈥楥ivilized鈥� Enough to Be Taxed: Indigeneity, Citizenship, and the 1919 Alaska School Tax.鈥� Law & Social Inquiry 48(3): 937鈥�970.

Zahnd, Maximilien. 2023. 鈥淧raise the Gardeners, Dun the Hunters: Alaska Natives, Taxation, and Settler Colonialism.鈥� Comparative Studies in Society and History 65(4): 932鈥�959.