Dr Robin Smith

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

Welcome! I crafted and maintain this website! If you would like your work, personal profile, or tax-related research news  to appear on this site, or have research or CfPs to share with our network of scholars, please be in touch with me!

I am an anthropologist of post-socialist Europe. My research focus is presently on the governance, fiscal, and business issues around the agribusiness sector in southeastern Europe. I began a multi-year research project in February 2022 at Copenhagen Business School.

My tax policy research focuses on the unintended consequences of tax reforms for rural Croatian entrepreneurs. I contributed to and co-edited the Social Analysis journal special issue Beyond the Social Contract: An Anthropology of Tax, with Nicolette Makovicky, which has been published as an edited volume by Berghahn (2023). I am co-editor of the book volume, Anthropology & Tax, Cambridge University Press with Miranda Sheild Johansson and Johanna Mugler that is in press and includes many authors present in this network.

I have also published in Anthropology Today, and in books like Wine and the Gift (2023, Ed. Peter Howland) and Food System Transformations (2021), and co-edited a book published in 2018 with LIT Verlag, Utopia & Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Rural Spaces.

In 2021, I was a Wenner-Gren Hunt Scholar to draft my monograph based on my doctoral research on economic resiliency in the Istrian business community. I am finished drafting it and am finalizing the book proposal. It is entitled, The Art of Getting By in Istrian Winemaking. I am also an academic guest at Utrecht University's Department of Anthropology.

My personal website, with an updated list of publications, is: www.robin-anthro.com

Dr Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar

Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar’s research lies at the crossroads of economic and political anthropology. His interest in the anthropology of tax was sparked during his PhD project on alternative economies in Catalonia. There he found that anti-capitalist networks and cooperatives not only engaged in tax evasion, but also created their own systems of common (monetary) resource pooling. This resulted in an article on what he calls ‘the Fiscal Commons’ (Social Analysis 64(2), 2020).

Vinzenz’s focus in the anthropology of tax lies with the various ways in which the social contract is negotiated and contested through tax and other forms of fiscal contributions.

He recently defended his dissertation entitled ‘Re-Assembling the Economy. Work, Life and Value in Catalonia’ and is currently working as a teacher at Utrecht University. In addition, he is preparing a research proposal on tax, the welfare state, and the changing economic order in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dr Marc P. Berenson

Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), King's College London, Russia Institute, School of Politics and Economics, England

Prior to joining King’s Russia Institute in September 2013, Dr Marc P. Berenson was serving, since 2007, as a research fellow on the Governance Team at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His projects on governance, tax compliance, tax administration, state capacity and state-society relations in Russia, Ukraine and Poland have been empirically, conceptually and methodologically ground-breaking, with a particular (and particularly important) focus on the ways in which citizens’ interactions with the bureaucracy shapes and is shaped by their perceptions of the state and the meaning of their own citizenship.

Dr Berenson’s recent book - Taxes and Trust: From Coercion to Compliance in Poland, Russia and Ukraine – was published by Cambridge University Press (free to download on Open Access) and focuses on three states at three, distinctly different stages of the transition from a coercive governing regime to a rule-of-law state.  Effective governance in the tax arena, the book shows, occurs when state and society interact in a dualistic process through trust.

Previously, Dr Berenson worked as a research analyst for the American Bar Association, the EastWest Institute, The Carter Center and the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He also has undertaken several consultancies, for, among others, the World Bank in Russia and the OECD’s Tax and Development Programme. 

After receiving his BA from Harvard University, Dr Berenson founded and directed from 1996 to 1998 the 'Law in Action' program for Freedom House in Kyiv, Ukraine, before receiving his PhD in Political Science from Princeton University in 2006. A recipient of more than a dozen academic grants and fellowships, he is fluent in Russian, Polish and English, reads Ukrainian and speaks Italian.

Dr Lotta Björklund Larsen

Associate Professor in Anthropology, Research Fellow at Tax Administration Research Centre, University of Exeter, England 

Broadly based in economic, legal and moral anthropology, my research interest circles around taxation. “Why we pay tax, why we avoid doing so and how we are made to pay tax” are questions that bring to fore people’s relation to state, market and fellow citizens. Through my research on taxation I have looked into knowledge that shapes people’s lives, collaborative anthropologies and the digitization of society.

I am convinced of the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to the tax field and thus for the anthropological contribution if we are to understand the obscenely complex issue that taxation is. The methodological assumptions for addressing taxation issues in different scientific disciplines is of particular interest for me.

Some of my recent publications:

A Fair Share of Tax: A Fiscal Anthropology of Contemporary Sweden (2018, Palgrave), available HERE

 “Mind the (tax) gap: An ethnography of a number” Journal of Cultural Economy, available HERE

Shaping Taxpayers. Values in Action at the Swedish Tax Agency (2017, Berghahn Books), available HERE, and also available as a podcast thanks to the New Books Network, HERE

My website has a complete list of publications, projects, and activities: www.lottabjorklundlarsen.se

Dr Karen Boll

Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark 

Originally, Karen Boll was trained as an ethnologist, and started her career as a civil servant in the Danish Ministry of Taxation – working with qualitative analyses of tax compliance practices. Subsequent to conducting a PhD in collaboration with the Danish tax authority, Boll has continued conducting ethnographic and qualitative studies of tax authorities’ work, business’ tax compliance practices, and collaborative tax regulation. This interest forms the entire portfolio of Boll’s research.

Boll’s work has been innovative in seeing tax compliance as an assemblage of relations and actors, and groundbreaking in her access to studying tax administration in both Denmark and Sweden. Boll's work on taxation has been published extensively in journals such as the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, the Nordic Tax Journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, the Journal of Cultural Economy, the Journal of Tax Administration and Accounting, and Organizations and Society.

Recently, Boll has been partner in the Horizon2020 project FairTax and done research on cooperative compliance and collaborative relations between large corporations and tax authorities.

See the Fairtax website for more information: https://www.umu.se/en/fairtax/

Dr Nate Coben

Affiliate, University of California Humanities Research Institute, USA

My research examines the intersections between fiscal policy in Ireland and socio-legal processes of repossessing and rehabilitating indebted real property. My ethnographic research in and around Irish "repossession courts" focuses on the political, moral, and socio-legal ramifications of long-term mortgage debt in rural Ireland after the end of the Celtic Tiger.

The way that law stages, translates, and opens state fiscal strategies to new cultural and political possibilities continues to be a central concern of my research, in addition to research on property or title registration. I am particularly interested in taxation as a threshold where state and social formations co-constitute each other.

My ethnographic research interests also include the adoption of North American anti-taxation and "sovereign citizen" ideologies among Irish lay litigant groups. I examine these currents of vernacularized radical ideology as marginal but potent byproducts of the tensions between economy and society that crop up around taxation and other fiscal processes.

Lars Döpking

Research Group Democracy and Statehood, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Germany

As an historical sociologist, Lars Döpking’s research focuses on the development of the tax state in Western Europe since 1945. His doctoral thesis analyses the transformations of the Italian tax state. He is most focused on the professionalization of tax authorities, the historical genesis of tax evasion, tax politics, and tax diplomacy ­­- always in an attempt to decipher the genesis of the Italian tax state’s rule as an accumulation of fiscal domination. Additionally, he pursues theoretical questions - what is a tax state and how does it change - and is equally interested in the developments of tax payment, tax extraction, and tax protest in Spain, Chile, and Germany.

Lars Döpking works at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, teaches at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Georg-August University Göttingen, and was a fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome. He is also member of the “Arbeitskreis Steuergeschichte”, an interdisciplinary network of German-speaking legal scholars, historians, social scientists, and economists.

Dr Nimmo Elmi

Linköping University, Fair Tax Project, Horizon 2020, Sweden

Nimmo Elmi earned her PhD at Linköping University. As an anthropologist as well as science and technology scholar, she researches the nexus between society and technology, specifically in taxation and digitalisation.

Elmi's research focuses mainly on how ideas and rationality travel to developing countries. Her current research attends to the current wave of  tax digitalisation in developing countries, specifically Kenya. Using anthropological methods she investigates how this technology creates community around itself. As part of this, she asks: who do the designers of the technology envision as the end user of this technology?

Her overall interest is to understand how the current wave of digitalisation corresponds to global ideas of sustainable economic development. The research project analyses holistically how taxation changes when policies like digitalisation are implemented in developing countries that have weak technological infrastructures.

See the Fairtax website for more information: https://www.umu.se/en/fairtax/

Dr Matti Eräsaari

Postdoctoral Researcher, Academy of Finland, University of Helsinki, Finland

Eräsaari specialises in Oceanic ethnography, and has written, for example, about exchange, value, funerals, food, and drink in Fiji. Eräsaari's most recent research projects have dealt with time: he spent 2015-2017 at the University of Manchester working on a project entitled, “Eating money, eating time: The value of time in Fiji”.

He currently works on comparative Finnish materials from a Helsinki-based timebank and from the time-allocation systems employed at Finnish universities.

Eräsaari’s research deals with taxation in two particular instances: Finnish timebanking and Fijian bookkeeping. His work on the Helsinki Timebank (in the 2020 issue of Social Analysis 64(2)) highlights the timebank’s struggle to maintain its own value regime which differs radically from the one issued in the Finnish Tax Administration’s instructions for timebanking in Finland.

Eräsaari’s work on Fijian “cash books” (Finnish-language book chapter under review) analyses village-level fundraising and its accounting practices as the expression of a particular Fijian moral economy embedded within colonial-era state proceduralism. In both instances, Eräsaari pays particular attention to the way number and quantity become subject to moral evaluations.

Ida Hughes Tidlund

Doctoral Researcher, Centre for Maritime Studies (CEMAS), Stockholm University, Sweden

Ida’s PhD project explores the borders of the autonomous region of the Åland islands in the Baltic Sea and the administration that comes with the geographical definition of the territory. With Åland being outside the value-added-tax area of the EU, the tangible implications of taxation stirred Ida’s interest in legal structures and individual practices.

She is particularly intrigued by the ways in which tax issues are connected to the symbolic autonomy of the minority, while at the same time being rather pragmatically approached in everyday life.

Trained as an ethnologist with an interest for the past, Ida’s research combines historical sources and contemporary ethnography. Her main research interest is at the crossroads of legal structures and everyday life.

Dr Anna-Riikka Kauppinen

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland

Anna-Riikka’s interest in taxation was sparked by listening to her Ghanaian colleagues compare the benefits of paying taxes to the state vis-à-vis paying tithes (ten percent of one’s income) to their churches. This resulted in an article on taxation as part of a broader universe of monetary transfers in which its capacity to realize public goods and other ‘rightful returns’ is negotiated (in Social Analysis 64(2), 2020). She is currently writing a book chapter entitled ‘The Nurturing State: an intimate portrait of becoming a tax-payer in Ghana,' which follows the moral dilemmas and demands that the process of formalizing a commercial enterprise, and thus becoming a taxable entity, elicits in Ghana.

Alongside taxation, Anna-Riikka is in the process of preparing a book manuscript titled Intimate Audits: Pursuing Professional Worth in a West African Business Hub, which builds on her doctoral work on professional aspiration and emerging audit cultures in Ghana’s capital Accra. As a post-doctoral Research Associate in Cambridge, she is currently researching Ghana's 2017-2019 banking crisis with a focus on the moral debates of accountability and economic sovereignty. Anna-Riikka also sustains a broader interest in the economic influence of Charismatic Pentecostal churches in West Africa and their role in the urban financial eco-system.

Dr Nicolette Makovicky

Lecturer in Russian and East European Studies, University of Oxford, England

Nicolette Makovicky is Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Russian and East European Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She has published on themes including labor, ethics, informal economy, tax, and entrepreneurialism in Slovakia and Poland. Her current interests are the political economy of handicrafts and pastoralism in Central Europe, and moral economies of corruption and tax fraud.

She is particularly interested in the way diverse cultural and political contexts - including histories of citizenship and moralities of exchange - may influence participation in collaborative tax regulation. She co-edited the recent special issue Beyond the Social Contract: An Anthropology of Tax with Robin Smith.

Dr Makovicky is the editor of Neoliberalism, Personhood, Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Ashgate, 2014), and co-editor of Economies of Favour after Socialism (University of Oxford Press, 2016) and Slogans: Subjection, Subversion and the Politics of Neoliberalism (Routledge 2018).

Dr Johanna Mugler

Lecturer and Researcher, Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern, Switzerland

Johanna’s work focuses predominately on an anthropological analysis of the working of modern statehood, and more specifically, how accountability and norms of sharing and distribution emerge and are being transformed in key state institutions.

Her second monograph analyzes the creation of international norms for taxing multinational enterprises' profits from an anthropological perspective. Through long-term field fieldwork (2014-2019) at the OECD in Paris, international tax conferences worldwide and at finance departments of G20 countries, she studied the actors and decision-making processes through which these norms develop, thereby contributing original insights into the sources of their authority and the stakes that underlie them.

Th book shows how key state and non-state decision-makers deal with the growing mismatch between the national territorial organization of nation-states and the increasing transnational orientation of economic activity. In addition, it raises the question how far current anthropological research habits contribute to our understanding of how to live in a world of global entanglements and worldwide interdependence extending beyond the reach of local and/or national government or impede such discussions.

She is the author of:  Measuring Justice. Quantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority. Cambridge University Press. 2019, shortlisted for the Book Prize of the British Socio-Legal Studies Association 2020; and A World of Indicators. The Making of Governmental Knowledge Through Quantification, Cambridge University Press. 2015, edited together with Sally Engle Merry, Sung-Joon Park and Richard Rottenburg.

She is also editing a volume, in press, Anthropology & Tax, together with Miranda Sheild Johansson and Robin Smith.

Dr Marija Norkunaite

Post-doctoral Researcher, Vilnius University, Lithuania & Post-doctoral Affiliate, the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, England

My doctoral research project looked at changing understandings and relations between people and the state in the Baltics after 1990, where I work on predominantly Russian-speaking, former socialist industrial regions in particular. Focusing on everyday encounters with different state institutions and practices such as citizenship and taxation, my research looks at how (non-)citizens in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia come to relate with what is today the national state and define their own position within it.

My interest in tax lies in the various ways that Russian-speaking as well as ethnically Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian (non-)citizens define and negotiate their identities as working and taxpaying subjects. I look at how the language of the social contract, and work and taxes in particular, is used to claim membership and deservedness within the national community.

Finally, I am interested in how people’s perceptions of the state affect their tax-related behaviour and (non-) compliance. Thereby, using the lens of tax, my research is primarily concerned with how the social contract is understood, negotiated, and constituted locally.

Dr Lynne Oats

Professor of Taxation and Accounting, University of Exeter, England

I am a tax specialist with a background in tax administration who has been teaching and researching taxation for many years, both in Australia and in the UK. My research interests revolve around how tax is practiced by taxpayers, tax authorities and policy makers, not only in contemporary settings but also historically.  

I strongly believe that tax needs to be viewed as a multifaceted and multidisciplinary endeavour and that thinking of tax as a purely economic or legal phenomenon severely limits our understanding of the way tax is shaped by, and shapes, the societies in which we live. In my 2012 publication, Taxation: A Fieldwork Research Handbook, I try to inspire new ways of thinking about tax through qualitative inquiry. 

More recently, I am currently leading an exciting new project called Fiscal Citizenship which explores the links between being a citizen and willingness to pay taxes in three countries, Canada, Germany and the UK. I have also researched the relationship between large, multinational enterprises and tax authorities, in part through work funded by the Horizon 2020 project FairTax.

Dr Oliver Owen

Departmental Lecturer, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, England

Olly's interests centre on political anthropology and the relations between governments and publics in West Africa, the configurations of material interests, experiences and meanings construed in these encounters; as part of an anthropology of the state which ‘de-naturalises’ governmental institutions to look at them as social formations. He recentely completed an ethnography of new transformations in revenue and fiscal governance in Nigeria, looking at taxation relationships between the state and citizens, and how questions of social contract and political accountability are popularly understood. Alongside this, he continues a focus on policing structures and practices, both engaging in comparative research on policing in the postcolonial world, and working with stakeholders in Nigeria to feed research into policy debates.

His new research extends time horizons forward and backward, looking at the ways both future and past are imagined through tropes such as infrastructure. He also continues other longstanding interests in history, politics and governance in the West African sub-region and is a co-researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on African Governance. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow running a three-year Economic and Social Research Council project entitled Social contracts in transformation: Tax reform in Nigeria at the Oxford Department of International Development (Queen Elizabeth House). 

Having an active programme of research engagements with policymakers and publics, since 2017, Olly has been the Research Director of the Nigeria Tax Research Network. His work on Nigeria’s World War II veterans resulted in a co-produced prizewinning short film, and ongoing work with publics in Nigeria and the diaspora to showcase and interpret soldiers’ songs in the Imperial War Museum collections.  In 2018, Olly was awarded a joint Social Science Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with Professor Wale Adebanwi to work with Lagos-based heritage groups on rail heritage in Nigeria.  In 2015, he won an ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize for his research on the Nigerian Police Force.

Dr Gregory Rawlings

Head of Programme, Social Anthropology Programme | Mātai Tikaka Takata​​, School of Social Sciences | Te Puna Pāpori, University of Otago | Te Whare Wānanga o Otāgo, Dunedin | Ōtepoti, New Zealand | Aotearoa

Greg Rawlings is the Head of the Social Anthropology Programme in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Otago, located in New Zealand’s South Island. Greg's research and teaching focuses on processes of globalisation, transnationalism and citizenship. He also has interests in the cultural politics of archiving and documentation, while earlier work examined urbanisation in the Pacific. Greg is a social anthropologist with intersecting interests in political, economic and historical anthropology. His interests in taxation emerged when conducting fieldwork in Vanuatu (known as the New Hebrides until independence in 1980), an archipelagic country of some 80 islands in the South West Pacific Ocean. Vanuatu is an offshore finance centre, or tax haven, and Greg became fascinated by the inequalities between indigenous ni-Vanuatu (the people of the place) and wealthy expatriates and descendents of colonial settlers. The latter invariably paid no income tax.  Indirect consumption, turnover and provincial taxes fell disproprirately on the mainly low-income indigenous majority. 

Greg subsquently worked on taxation research while at the Centre for Tax System Integrity (CTSI) (which operated 1999-2006) at the Australian National University (ANU), http://regnet.anu.edu.au/research/centres/centre-tax-system-integrity-ctsi and http://www.ctsi.org.au  which has continued since he arrived at the University of Otago in 2007. This research has included projects and publications on tax compliance amongst Small and Medium Sized Entreprises (SMEs) and large corporations in Australia, the OECD’s work on offshore finannce centres, histories of tax havens, the use of offshore trusts and the relationship between notions of fairness, citizrenship and tax morale. Greg was also involved in a collaborate project at the University of Utrecht examining money laudering in the Netherlands from 2005-2006.

This tax research  has been complemented by interests in citizenship, nationality and human rights. He has now turned his attention to examine the ways residency, citizenship, statelessness and nationality influence taxation and is examining how the concepts of abode, domicile and residence can be invoked to reduce tax obligations. As with citizenship-for-sale programmes, countries are moving towards offering “tax residence” to investors. They then either forgo the tax due or offer generous concessions such as tax holidays which can last for up to a decade. This continues research that positions the nexus between citizenship and taxation to examine relationships between persons, properties and states and the historical hierarchies that have produced contemporary transnational and global political, economic and cultural orders.

Dr Janet Roitman

University Professor at The New School, New York, USA

Janet Roitman is a University Professor at The New School and founder/director of the Platform Economies Research Group. She has conducted extensive research in Central Africa with a focus on the anthropology of value and emergent forms of the political. 

Her first book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press, 2005), is an analysis of unregulated commerce in the Chad Basin that documents emergent forms of economic regulation and explains consequential transformations in state governance in the Chad Basin. 

Her second book, Anti-Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) investigates the concept of crisis as an object of knowledge. This work examines how the concept of crisis enables certain questions while foreclosing others, using the 2007-2008 Great Recession as a point of illustration.

Her current research focuses on new financial technologies and “high finance” in West Africa, with specific attention to new platforms for value production and the emergence of domestic capital markets. Prior to joining The New School, she was a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and an instructor at Sciences-Po, Paris. Her research has received support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Agence française du développement, and the Institute for Public Knowledge.

See her faculty page for a full list of publications and links: Here

Dr Gayatri Sahgal

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Gayatri Sahgal's  research interests centre around the broad themes of state capacity, taxation and the political economy of development. Prior to beginning her post-doctoral position, Gayatri received her PhD in Area studies from the University of Oxford (2023). Her thesis, examined how fiscal relations emerge in fragile contexts where the idea of a centralised authority, such as a state, is either suspect or contested. Using the case study of Somalia, she interrogated the factors motivating tax compliance of large private sector actors and discussed the implication of such relationships for long-term institutional development and growth. While at the University of Pennsylvania, she will be working on publishing her findings.

Gayatri’s research is informed by a decade of work as a research and monitoring evaluation specialist. In this capacity, she managed and led evaluation studies for various governance and development organisations, including the World Bank, European Union, Foreign Commonwealth Office for Development, and the United Nations Development Programme. Her work spanned several countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Somalia, India, and Afghanistan.

Gayatri also holds a postgraduate degree in Public Policy from Brown University and a Master’s in Development Studies from the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson

Senior Research Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University College London, England

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a Senior Research Fellow and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at UCL Anthropology. Her research explores the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region, where she has undertaken long-term fieldwork in a rural Quechua-speaking community, as well as in the peri-urban zones of Cochabamba city.

Miranda’s UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, ‘The Sociality of Tax: A Multiperspective Study of Fiscal Relations (SocTax)’ investigates fiscal regimes and cultures in an anthropological fashion comparing Bolivia, the UK, and Sweden, and exploring the types of social relations that paying and not paying tax produce in different ethnographic settings. Miranda is also a researcher on the ERC-funded project 'Anthropologies of Extortion' (PI Professor Lucia Michelutti), working as part of an international group of scholars to map and analyse cultures of extortion. In 2017 she was awarded the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for her project 'Becoming a Taxpayer: Fiscal Expansion and Economic Subjectivities in Bolivia'.

Miranda is the co-editor of the volume, Anthropology & Tax: Ethnographies of Fiscal Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and the author of the Tax entry in The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology. She co-edited the Special Issue ‘An Anthropology of the Social Contract: Interrogating Contractarian Thinking in State-Society Relations' (Critique of Anthropology, 2022) and has published pieces on Andean fiscal cultures in Social Analysis, Critique of Anthropology, and History and Anthropology. Together with Dr Soumhya Venkatesan she secured funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for a workshop on the Anthropology of tax. She is also a founder and convenor of EASA's Anthropology of Tax network.

Dr Andreas Streinzer

Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Struggles surrounding tax compliance and evasion during the eurozone crisis sparked Andreas' interest in an economic anthropological analysis of taxation. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the reconfigurations of everyday economies in Greece during the so-called sovereign debt crisis. The dissertation showed how political and economic anthropological analysis can connect impoverishment in Greece to fiscal politics in the European Union.

In this context, everyday practices between citizens, tax offices, and political economic negotiations at the supra-national level became an entry point into people's situatedness in contemporary capitalist societies. The theoretical interest behind this analytical approach was ultimately to contribute to an anthropological understanding of social reproduction. 

His current research builds on these interests yet takes his anthropological work elsewhere. As a post-doctoral researcher on the “Moralizing Inequality” project at the University of St. Gallen, Andreas investigates struggles about wealth and inheritance taxation in Austria. The project advances a broad understanding of welfare and taxation in the current neo-nationalist, productivist, and familist conjuncture. His research interest lies in the simultaneity of distributed value generation and the territorial organization of economic calculation and redistribution.

To read more about the Moralizing Inequality project, see its website: https://moralisations-of-inequality.org