The Sociality of Tax: A Multiperspective Study of Fiscal Relations (SocTax)

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Tax is a core element of how citizens experience and imagine their relationships with the state, other citizens, and indeed perceive their own roles, identities and responsibilities within society and nation. While the broader social sciences have thoroughly researched fiscal policies and realities, this research foregrounds the sociality of tax-the types of relationships that different tax regimes produce. The project investigates fiscal regimes in an anthropological fashion. It will explore the various social relations that paying and not paying tax produce rather than focusing on fiscal compliance or the macro and microeconomics of tax. It does so comparatively and cross-culturally: spanning multiple fieldsites, including neighbourhoods, workplaces, community groups, political interest groups, and tax offices, and three fiscal systems-Bolivia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. 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. The aim is not to account for any one nation's fiscal relations in totality, but instead to ensure that diverse perspectives are used to produce a broad set of theoretical concerns. This actor-centered perspective focused on sociality expands the concerns of fiscal scholarship and aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of what taxes are and doTax is generally thought to be premised on a founding philosophy of a 'good' exchange-be it taxes for representation, security, rights or services, and fiscal systems are often perceived of as soul less and utilitarian. This research aims to go beyond this narrow perception of tax in order to grasp the real and imagined social relationships, logics, moral discourses, and desires that fiscal regimes contain and generate. In addition to shaping national economies, taxes caste people and communities in particular roles, such as citizen and non-citizen, contributor and 'wealth creator', or dependant and 'scrounger.' In the same way flows of money are named and variably understood, with different moral and social elements attached to them, as well as stories about credit and debt-who owes whom. This study will track how actors and money flows in fiscal systems gain their character and moral baggage and investigate how this produces particular social relations. This research employs long-term ethnographic fieldwork as its main methodological approach. Participant observation will be conducted in all three case countries; this will involve living alongside research participants with the aim of understanding the fiscal systems they exist within from their perspective. The following four questions guide the research: RQ1) How do historical and cultural context impact on fiscal relations? RQ2) How do people relate varyingly to different taxes and different taxpayers, and what are the ethics and logics of contribution, sharing and wealth creation? RQ3) How do people relate tax to other financial exchanges, especially those that also produce public goods? RQ4) What are the social effects of tax administration, including digital collection? The research aims to establish anthropology of tax as a new field of study and contribute to wider fiscal scholarship through its innovative focus on the sociality of tax. In deepening our understandings of the effects of fiscal systems, the research makes original contributions to public and policy debates around taxes, redistribution, inequality, social exclusion and financial welfare.