Revenue, Rule, and the Revenue Rule: Toward an Anthropology of Taxation
Bill Maurer - University of California, Irvine
Abstract:
Anthropologists have long studied money’s function as a means of
exchange. However, the field has been less successful at thinking about
money as a method of payment, or payments in general, as exemplified by
debates over bridewealth and brideservice. This paper argues that the
prominence of exchange and circulation in the popular and academic
imagination of contemporary economies has made it difficult to think
about methods of payment precisely at the historical moment when
payments among people and states have become newly morally ambiguous.
Along the way, it makes a case for paying attention to new
configurations of revenue, rule, and standards-setting without
reproducing tired denunciations of neoliberalism. The paper does this by
discussing the international effort to curtail “harmful tax
competition,” itself a concept of substantial definitional anxiety. That
effort has drawn multilateral organizations like the OECD, NGOs like
Oxfam, right-wing think-tanks, various Christian groups, and the world’s
tax havens – microstates like the British Virgin Islands – into an
extended dialogue about the causes and consequences of the geographic
differentiation of states and taxation regimes.
It has also resulted in a number of regulatory and legal changes in
offshore jurisdictions. Yet, to many observers, the effort ultimately
failed. The paper tracks that apparent failure and attempts to offer an
alternative explanation of the debate over harmful tax competition, via
an anthropology of taxation and payment.
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