Anthropology and Tax

This collection of anthropological work on tax explores how fiscal systems produce social lives, values, and normative orders.

The first substantial collection of anthropological work on tax, this book uses ethnographic data from around the world to elucidate how tax systems shape not just our economic lives, but our social relationships and our values, and how they categorise people and things. It reconceptualises what taxes do in society.From the perspective of individual taxpayers to international tax norm negotiators, the anthropologists in this collection explore how taxes shape our world: our social relationships and value regimes, how we exclude and include, the categories we think with, and the way we share with each other. A first of its kind, it presents an anthropological discussion about tax rooted in ethnographic work. It asks fundamental questions such as: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? By forwarding multiple perspectives from around the world about fiscal systems and how they are experienced and constituted, Anthropology and Tax reconceptualises tax in society. In doing so, this volume makes an incisive intervention in what might be one of the most important debates of our time – that of fiscal sociality. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.