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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