Introduction: Tax Beyond the Social Contract
Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith

Chapter 1. Taxes for Independence: Rejecting a Fiscal Model of Reciprocity in Peri-urban Bolivia
Miranda Sheild Johansson

Chapter 2. God's Delivery State: Taxes, Tithes, and a Rightful Return in Urban Ghana
Anna-Riikka Kauppinen

Chapter 3. The Fiscal Commons: Tax Evasion, the State, and Commoning in a Catalonian Cooperative
Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar

Chapter 4. Contesting the Social Contract: Tax Reform and Economic Governance in Istria, Croatia
Robin Smith

Chapter 5. Into and Out of Citizenship, through Personal Tax Payments: Romanian Migrants’ Leveraging of British Self-Employment
Dora-Olivia Vicol

Chapter 6. The Worth of the ‘While’: Time and Taxes in a Finnish Timebank
Matti Eräsaari

Afterword: Putting Together the Anthropology of Tax and the Anthropology of Ethics
Soumhya Venkatesan

Index

Beyond the Social Contract

An Anthropology of Tax

Edited by Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith

163 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-040-4 Hb Published (August 2023)

Details

Tax and taxation are conventionally understood as the embodiment of social contract. This ground-breaking collection of essays challenges this truism, examining what tax might tell us about the limits of social-contract thinking. The contributors shed light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems, using tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. Their ethnographically grounded accounts show how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state, taking various forms, from alternative religious communities to economic collectives.

Nicolette Makovicky is Director of Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She is the editor of Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor of Slogans: Subjection, Subversion, and the Politics of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2019).

Robin Smith is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Organization and Academic Guest at Utrecht University’s Department of Cultural Anthropology. Her work has benefited from the financial support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Independent Social Research Foundation, Clarendon Fund, and American Council of Learned Societies.

Series: Volume 15, Studies in Social Analysis

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

Area:

LC: HJ2305 .B49 2023

BISAC: BUS064000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Taxation/General; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC050000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Social Classes

available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Beyond the Social Contract

An Anthropology of Tax

Edited by Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith

Series: Volume 15, Studies in Social Analysis

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

Area:

This title is published as Open Access

Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUB Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.

Home -> Title

Contents

Beyond the Social Contract

An Anthropology of Tax

Edited by Nicolette Makovicky and Robin Smith

Series: Volume 15, Studies in Social Analysis

Subject: Political and Economic Anthropology

Area:

This title is published as Open Access

Full Text PDF | Full Text ePUB Made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with support from Berghahn Open Anthro, in partnership with Libraria.