Soumhya Venkatesan

This collaborative and international effort draws on original ethnographic data on fiscal cultures and tax-focused state and non-state actions in diverse settings; the workshop aims to develop an innovative research project aimed at establishing an original field of study ‘ the anthropology of tax. While the broader social sciences have thoroughly researched fiscal policies and realities, in anthropology taxation is a relatively unexplored area of study. We will focus the workshop on opening up confluences in the work of the participants that nevertheless take into account the multiplicity of our informants’ different engagements with tax in principle and practice. This will enable us to not only articulate the contours of the sub-field of the anthropology of tax, but also to make theoretically and ethnographically grounded interventions in broader anthropological debates on the state, citizenship, money flows and responsibility that have hitherto not systematically considered questions of tax and taxation. The collaborative effort will also lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary investigations into contemporary fiscal structures, and participate in popular debates regarding the moralities, practices and imaginaries of fiscal systems.