Spreading it around: a new look at redistribution and tax

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.

Meet our speakers and chair

Deborah James specializes in the anthropology of economy. Her 2025 book Clawing Back: A New Anthropology of Redistribution in Precarious Times explores how people patchwork together a livelihood from the triad of debt, wages, welfare, in seeking to gain (or keep hold of) their ‘rightful share'.

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a senior research fellow in social anthropology at UCL and an alumnus of LSE. She specializes in the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region.

Johanna Mugler lectures in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bern University. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of organizational studies, anthropology of the state, legal anthropology and sociology of quantification.

Robin Smith is an independent researcher, and an anthropologist of post-socialist Europe. She works on rural debt and economic governance, exploring how rural businessmen make ends meet in times of protracted economic precarity, and how post-socialist governments contribute to or mitigate the effects of joining the EU for their citizens.

Mukulika Banerjee (@MukulikaB) is an expert on the cultural meanings of democracy in India, and political anthropology more generally. She is about to embark on a new research project about taxation in India. She is the author of Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India: an anthropological study of the relationship of formal political democracy and the cultivation of active citizenship in West Bengal.

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