Tax season woes have complex roots

From Bolivia to the U.K. to Sweden, how people perceive their financial relationship with the state depends on everything from local culture—and history—to what the taxes and benefits are calle

Dog Bites and Gastrointestinal Disorders: Our Everyday Bodies in Teaching Anthropology and Fieldwork Preparation

What are the physical experiences of fieldwork really like? This article invites anthropologists engaged in teaching to transform the way research methods are currently taught to include frank and thoughtful conversations on how bodies, in their mundane physicality, are implicated in fieldwork. While the (mindful) body that actively and purposefully engages with the reality under investigation has gained centrality in anthropological discussions about “being there”, the body that things happen to has been ignored or marginalised. We contend that an exploration of the body that falls ill, feels uncomfortable, or simply does not match with an idealised image of the skilled and productive fieldworker (often male and able-bodied) has practical, pedagogical, political, and analytical merits. By recounting some of our own private anecdotes of challenges encountered in fieldwork, we emphasise the centrality of our physical experiences to our ethnographic approach. Discussing the glamourless, bodily aspects of fieldwork is crucial to preparing ourselves and our students for fieldwork, to combating ableism in anthropology, and to downplaying anxiety over narrow standard goals of “good” fieldwork. We also argue that theoretical considerations of the messy and unpleasant physical experiences that fieldwork involves can bring further insight into how research is (un)done

Taxing the indigenous: a history of barriers to fiscal inclusion in the Bolivian highlands

Following the electoral success of left wing and pro-indigenous President Evo Morales, the indigenous poor in Bolivia find themselves at the centre of a new vision of the state, echoed by a fervent citizenship project to include them as contributing participants in this new Bolivia. The state is working to initiate these hitherto informally employed subjects into an individualized fiscal regime: to make them into “taxpayers”. While the highland indigenous population have supported Morales’ political project, they resist inclusion into the broader state-sponsored project. This is not simply about avoiding financial obligations; their resistance is instead firmly rooted in the historical experience of fiscal exploitation, general suspicion of any state-run scheme as well as a clash of exchange models. I argue that in order to overcome these barriers, the Tax Office has to succeed in separating fiscal expansion from its association with an abstract state concept, and instead link it to palpable everyday life and politics, such as the union structure and Morales’ project of indigenous inclusion

The politics of coproduction during Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide’: Water, housing, and waste in comparative perspective

Coproduction brings together a diverse range of state and non-state actors to create and deliver public services. These processes, which occur across the Global South, have been widely studied. However, insufficient critical attention has been paid to their politics. We address this gap in the literature by analysing the politics of coproduction in Latin America during the ‘pink tide’ of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on original qualitative research, this article explores the coproduction of three distinct public services—water, housing, and waste—in three countries where left-leaning presidents and governments were elected into office—Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay. We argue that coproduction is intrinsically political in these three cases; that is, the ‘political’ is internal to, and inherent in, coproduction. Our comparative analysis centres on two political dimensions—subject-making and collective autonomy—and shows that tensions around these two issues were central to coproduction in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay . The article demonstrates the importance of not treating politics as a mere contextual concern in coproduction analysis and shows that coproduction has the capacity to reshape political relationships and subjectivities. Taking politics into account is essential to understanding the dynamics and potential of coproduction in the Global South. Our comparative analysis also provides new insights into Latin American politics, especially concerning 'pink tide' governments and the provisioning of public services

Taxes for independence: rejecting a fiscal model of reciprocity in peri-urban Bolivia

In peri-urban Cochabamba, Bolivia, the ‘informally’ employed population reject the government’s fiscal offer of taxes in return for welfare, infrastructure, and rights, including the offer’s underlying logic of reciprocity. Instead, they disaggregate the fiscal landscape by choosing to engage with some taxes and avoid others, understanding the exchanges that do take place as vehicles for independence from the state as opposed to interdependence with the state. An anthropology of tax must do the same: deconstruct fiscal systems, examine the multiple exchange logics at play, investigate the production of diverse forms of ‘economic citizenship’, and locate emic definitions of tax within their historical and cultural context. Specifically, reciprocity should not be assumed to be an organizing principle of fiscal imaginaries or realities