Pub Date : 2023-05-09DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175972
Casper Jacobsen
For decades, indigenist anthropology has been considered indefensible in Mexico. Its conception of Indigeneity persists, however, as a resource for national heritage and identity construction. This article analyses works on Indigenous peoples by prominent Mexican scholars and traces their links to contemporary heritage narratives and practices. It discusses how a national anthropological historiography, embedded in a secularizing ideology and state project, has generated a popular, transhistorical view of Indigenous peoples as embedded in a world of religious belief. I contend that this gaze has a dematerializing discursive effect, dissociating Indigenous peoples, past and present, from material agendas and practices. This is a dispossessive narrative tradition that is being regenerated through the framework of intangible heritage.
{"title":"Does being Indigenous imply being religious? Anthropology, heritage, and historiography in Mexico","authors":"Casper Jacobsen","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175972","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, indigenist anthropology has been considered indefensible in Mexico. Its conception of Indigeneity persists, however, as a resource for national heritage and identity construction. This article analyses works on Indigenous peoples by prominent Mexican scholars and traces their links to contemporary heritage narratives and practices. It discusses how a national anthropological historiography, embedded in a secularizing ideology and state project, has generated a popular, transhistorical view of Indigenous peoples as embedded in a world of religious belief. I contend that this gaze has a dematerializing discursive effect, dissociating Indigenous peoples, past and present, from material agendas and practices. This is a dispossessive narrative tradition that is being regenerated through the framework of intangible heritage.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48982739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157552
Miguel Pérez, C. Palma
Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Since 2018, Venezuelans have been the largest immigrant group, making up 30% of all international migrants living in Chile. This article explores how Venezuelan migrants become citizen-subjects through their residential practices, that is, through actions that symbolically construct their inhabited spaces (neighborhood and housing). Understanding citizenship as a process that implies the ethical formation of the self as a construction of new forms of belonging and political membership, we show how the daily life of these migrants is traversed by tensions surrounding their identity: while in public space they openly affirm their identity as diasporic Venezuelans, in the domestic sphere they hide said identity to accommodate an ideal of citizenship inspired by notions of civility, compliance, and moderation.
{"title":"Migrants as subject-citizens: Identity affirmation and domestic concealment among Venezuelans living in Santiago, Chile","authors":"Miguel Pérez, C. Palma","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157552","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Since 2018, Venezuelans have been the largest immigrant group, making up 30% of all international migrants living in Chile. This article explores how Venezuelan migrants become citizen-subjects through their residential practices, that is, through actions that symbolically construct their inhabited spaces (neighborhood and housing). Understanding citizenship as a process that implies the ethical formation of the self as a construction of new forms of belonging and political membership, we show how the daily life of these migrants is traversed by tensions surrounding their identity: while in public space they openly affirm their identity as diasporic Venezuelans, in the domestic sphere they hide said identity to accommodate an ideal of citizenship inspired by notions of civility, compliance, and moderation.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46793870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157544
J. Pina-Cabral
Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.
{"title":"‘of evident invisibles’: Ethnography as intermediation","authors":"J. Pina-Cabral","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157544","url":null,"abstract":"Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43994791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156718
Rachael Root
Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions.
人类的聪明才智通过技术的复杂性和累积行为的变化来应对不断变化的环境和资源。当人类学家回顾过去和全球化进程来描绘自然界的这些变化时，人们越来越意识到这些变化也发生在数字网络世界中。我认为考古学对物质性的关注为民族志电子游戏分析提供了有用的分析和方向。我使用了大型多人在线角色扮演游戏《魔兽世界:德拉诺之王》(World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor)的研究，在这款游戏中，玩家可以在自然世界和数字世界中管理社会和经济资源。在建立声誉和积累声望的过程中，玩家整合线上和线下资源，在追求成就的过程中跨越有形/数字鸿沟。考古学的观点和强化、遏制、系统、景观和本体论物质性的理论提供了将人种学电子游戏研究和辩论扩展到新方向的机会。
{"title":"Bridging anthropological theory: Accumulating and containing wealth in World of Warcraft landscapes","authors":"Rachael Root","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156718","url":null,"abstract":"Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156709
A. Faas
I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroically on an Other-Nature-Disaster without history. In China, the state is embodied by conventional faces of the state apparatus. By contrast, in New York, such leaders are notably absent. Instead, the focus is on “heroic” first responders that I argue constitute devolved encounters with the state—neither faceless nor portrayed by official leaders, but instead embodied by neighbors, friends, and everyday heroes. In both contexts, I find similar techniques of producing aesthetic assemblages within which, whether the proximal agent of suffering be human or no, any purportedly external perturbation creates a crisis of state integrity that is discursively cloaked in the language of the Nature of the Other and this is partially accomplished by enframing emergencies in carefully delimited timeframes.
{"title":"State aesthetics and the Other–Nature in disaster memorials","authors":"A. Faas","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156709","url":null,"abstract":"I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroically on an Other-Nature-Disaster without history. In China, the state is embodied by conventional faces of the state apparatus. By contrast, in New York, such leaders are notably absent. Instead, the focus is on “heroic” first responders that I argue constitute devolved encounters with the state—neither faceless nor portrayed by official leaders, but instead embodied by neighbors, friends, and everyday heroes. In both contexts, I find similar techniques of producing aesthetic assemblages within which, whether the proximal agent of suffering be human or no, any purportedly external perturbation creates a crisis of state integrity that is discursively cloaked in the language of the Nature of the Other and this is partially accomplished by enframing emergencies in carefully delimited timeframes.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47353702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156713
Pauline Destrée
In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.
{"title":"‘We work for the Devil’: Oil extraction, kinship and the fantasy of time on the offshore frontier","authors":"Pauline Destrée","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156713","url":null,"abstract":"In the offshore oil industry of Takoradi, Ghana, white expatriate workers describe oil extraction as both ‘the work of the Devil’ and a ‘labour of love’. While companies strive to produce the offshore as a timeless and spaceless fantasy of ‘frictionless profit’, workers emphasize oil work as a sacrificial economy where risk, loss and distance are traded in the pursuit of an ideal of family life. In this article, I argue that the operational structures and labour regime of the offshore (characterized by a rotation pattern, continuous production, distant locations, a segregated workforce, and mobile installations) create not only a model of capital accumulation, but a mode of being and making kin. I describe oil workers’ aspirations to a ‘good family life’ and parental care, pitting time against distance, and the interpersonal ruins that remain when they fray. In probing how oil workers make petro-capitalism affectively workable, by exploring the entangled processes of extractive and reproductive labour, this article contributes to recent scholarship on the role of kinship in sustaining global capitalism.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47093460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157559
Michael Scroggins
Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio’s global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century.
{"title":"A feral science? Dangers and disruptions between DIYbio and the FBI","authors":"Michael Scroggins","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157559","url":null,"abstract":"Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio’s global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48715482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139163
Maxim Bolt
South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Johannesburg, the Master’s biggest and busiest branch, this article examines how law is performed in bureaucratic encounters, and how this shapes the everyday relations that make legal bureaucrats as middle-class professionals. Middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new post-apartheid generation of largely black officials. Formal qualifications facilitate forms of distinction that maintain both prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is fraught. The Master and its administrators are positioned between post-apartheid potential and apartheid legal legacies; between transformation and a still racialised society; between professional ideal as legal bureaucrats and the career possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.
{"title":"‘Creature of statute’: Legal bureaucracy and the performance of professionalism in Johannesburg","authors":"Maxim Bolt","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139163","url":null,"abstract":"South Africa’s Master of the High Court administers property inheritance. Described as a ‘creature of statute’, and staffed by legally trained officials, the law takes centre-stage. Focusing on Johannesburg, the Master’s biggest and busiest branch, this article examines how law is performed in bureaucratic encounters, and how this shapes the everyday relations that make legal bureaucrats as middle-class professionals. Middle-class status is performed in the very enactment of a professional system, inflected by the racialised positioning of a new post-apartheid generation of largely black officials. Formal qualifications facilitate forms of distinction that maintain both prestige and everyday roles. Yet this is fraught. The Master and its administrators are positioned between post-apartheid potential and apartheid legal legacies; between transformation and a still racialised society; between professional ideal as legal bureaucrats and the career possibilities of a more lawyerly legal world.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44674064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139159
Marek Mikuš
Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.
{"title":"‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia","authors":"Marek Mikuš","doi":"10.1177/0308275X221139159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X221139159","url":null,"abstract":"Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42397480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-21DOI: 10.1177/0308275X221139154
Miranda Sheild Johansson
The recently re-branded and highly digitalised Bolivian Tax Office, Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales (SIN), works to consolidate various socio-economic groups, such as the Aymara bourgeoisie (wealthy traders who identify as all or part indigenous), into a new middle class. SIN’s motivations to do so are bound up in broader international financial logics where the development of an archetypal European middle class – the so-called backbone of society – is considered key to a healthy tax profile. The efforts to forge a new middle class involves the deliberate projection of SIN as an accountable, effective, and ‘modern’ organisation, with the aim of promoting a broader fiscal culture that embodies these same characteristics; targeted education of the populace about taxpaying as an ethical act in line with highland indigenous values; and, policy-making that encourages income tax over VAT (value-added tax). However, these new middle classes experience the temporality and individualising effects of SIN’s system as incompatible with the money flows and values of their own economic lives. Specific areas of contention include the rhythms of incomes and the ethics of risk- and profit-sharing. In exploring this incompatibility, I argue that fiscal systems are key to the production and imaginations of middle-classness, both as they succeed and fail.
玻利维亚税务局(Servicio de Impuestos Nacionales, SIN)最近重新命名并高度数字化，致力于整合各种社会经济群体，如艾马拉资产阶级(认为自己是全部或部分土著的富裕商人)，成为新的中产阶级。SIN这样做的动机与更广泛的国际金融逻辑密切相关，在国际金融逻辑中，典型的欧洲中产阶级——所谓的社会支柱——的发展被认为是健康税收状况的关键。打造新中产阶级的努力包括有意将国家统计局塑造为一个负责任、有效和“现代”的组织，目的是促进体现这些特征的更广泛的财政文化;有针对性地对民众进行纳税教育，使其成为符合高地本土价值观的道德行为;二是政策制定鼓励征收所得税而非增值税。然而，这些新兴的中产阶级经历了SIN系统的暂时性和个体化影响，与他们自己经济生活的资金流动和价值观不相容。具体的争论领域包括收入的节奏以及风险和利润分享的伦理。在探讨这种不兼容性时，我认为财政制度是中产阶级产生和想象的关键，无论是成功还是失败。
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