Spreading it around: a new look at redistribution and tax

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Contributor(s): Professor Deborah James FBA, Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson, Dr Johanna Mugler, Dr Robin Smith | In this panel discussion, anthropologists working on redistribution and tax will present the findings of—and interrogate each other on—two recent books: Clawing Back: redistribution in precarious times, and Anthropology and Tax: ethnographies of fiscal relations. Anthropologists view redistribution in unusual ways. In exploring how people pay for what they need and want, we consider how allocative processes operate beyond those tried and tested in the heyday of the welfare state. Typically, incomes are earned through wage work, or people revert to benefits. Yet austerity has reduced welfare systems in the North, while those in the South are under-developed. To make ends meet, people use both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ resources, payments and economic relationships, creating larger networks of redistribution. They seek new ways to supplement meagre incomes, combining work, welfare and debt. But, as Deborah James shows, combining these three income sources is not straightforward: it requires canny intervention by local advisers on the one hand and householders on the other. Meanwhile, contributions, tributes and tithes, as shown by Miranda Sheild Johansson, Robin Mugler and Robin Smith, enable taxation beyond the exchequer. Their focus on fiscal systems looks at how the sharing, extraction, and flow of resources not only produce economic realities but also shape relations of belonging, dependence, and exclusion, as well as social and philosophical categories regarding work, and value.