Emory University received a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc. to hold a workshop entitled Tax Matters:  Anthropological Theory and Ethnographic Methods to the Service of a New Fiscal Sociology."  It was organized by José Muñoz, (former Postdoctoral fellow, Development Studies) and The Emory Program in Development Studies and was co-sponsored by The Halle Institute.

The workshop was held at Emory University, April 4- 6, 2013.

Abstact of the workshop aim and scope:

Taxes are one of the long-established, generalized, and persistent means through which individuals and groups experience relationships with their government, the legal system, and the broader society of which they are members. "New fiscal sociology" has been recently proposed as the name for an emerging field of scholarly inquiry that places the relations of taxation at the center of historical and comparative accounts of social change. This and other recent academic ventures have attracted contributions from economics, sociology, political science, history, geography, law, and accounting. Anthropologists have been conspicuously absent in this new wave of scholarship.

Through the critical examination of tax policy, law, and administration in a series of diverse settings, we will take important steps in fulfilling the promise of anthropology for the study these issues. Three premises guide our efforts: our readiness to rise to the challenges of interdisciplinary research, our determination to take the technical aspects of taxation seriously, and our emphasis on rigorous ethnographic engagement. Confronted with the wide open frontiers of anthropological research on taxation, the workshop chooses to focus on three sets of questions: fiscal payments and the social contract; taxation and bureaucratic knowledge practices; and global fiscal governance. We intend to contribute thus to major theoretical debates in political, economic, and legal anthropology.

Participants in the workshop:

Karen Boll (Copenhagen Business School)
Thomas Cantens (World Customs Organization)
Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida)
Jane Guyer (Johns Hopkins)
Peter Little (Emory University)
Isaac Martin (University of California/San Diego)
William Maurer (University of California/Irvine)
Mick Moore (Institute of Development Studies, Sussex)
José Muñoz (University of Edinburgh)
David Nugent (Emory University)

A roundtable discussion was held as a part of the workshop entitled "What Do Social Scientists Talk About When They Talk About Taxes?"

Photos from the Workshop: