While death remains a popular topic for anthropology, relatively few ethnographic accounts consider the modern bureaucratic processes accompanying it. One such process is public health autopsy, which scholars have largely taken for granted. Existing analysis has regarded it as a form of ‘cultural brokering’ and autopsy reluctance in communities is seen, within both medical and cultural models, as a matter of ontological difference between incommensurable scientific and spiritual cosmologies. This article presents an ethnographic case study of the disagreement between a biomedical practitioner and the bereaved family on the death of a teenager who died of an unknown illness. The family's wish to hold a wake, as is customary in the rural Peruvian Andes, clashed with the doctor's mandate to determine the cause of death through autopsy. However, the details of the disagreement and the wider context of the deceased's health‐seeking itinerary suggest that ontological contradictions alone do not adequately explain the disagreement, but must be considered alongside the social relations in which these actors were embedded. Administrative state processes of certification, often overlooked by the anthropology of death in favour of more striking responses and rituals, are shown to be analytically vital to how communities negotiate mourning and grieving.
{"title":"Autopsy, deathways, and intercultural healthcare in the southern Peruvian Andes","authors":"David M.R. Orr","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70018","url":null,"abstract":"While death remains a popular topic for anthropology, relatively few ethnographic accounts consider the modern bureaucratic processes accompanying it. One such process is public health autopsy, which scholars have largely taken for granted. Existing analysis has regarded it as a form of ‘cultural brokering’ and autopsy reluctance in communities is seen, within both medical and cultural models, as a matter of ontological difference between incommensurable scientific and spiritual cosmologies. This article presents an ethnographic case study of the disagreement between a biomedical practitioner and the bereaved family on the death of a teenager who died of an unknown illness. The family's wish to hold a wake, as is customary in the rural Peruvian Andes, clashed with the doctor's mandate to determine the cause of death through autopsy. However, the details of the disagreement and the wider context of the deceased's health‐seeking itinerary suggest that ontological contradictions alone do not adequately explain the disagreement, but must be considered alongside the social relations in which these actors were embedded. Administrative state processes of certification, often overlooked by the anthropology of death in favour of more striking responses and rituals, are shown to be analytically vital to how communities negotiate mourning and grieving.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145765153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through an ethnography of exertion, this article adds to anthropological literature on the actions and interpretations of marginalized groups in response to social hardship and suffering. It argues that, against a reduction in social and state‐support mechanisms in Eastern Uttarakhand, north India, women consciously used physical exertion to achieve household stability. Exertion manifested as arduous paid labour, which strengthened household positions and prospects, alongside unpaid physical service, which sustained inter‐household and extended social relationships. Women's most reliable resource towards reproducing a collective future was their continuous physical labour – which led them to intentionally deprioritize their immediate, individual health concerns. Caste and class networks shaped the possibilities and risks of exertion. Despite women's efforts, exertion had its limits and was sometimes fallible. Women responded to these limits by adopting self‐reliance as a discursive measure to calibrate their exertion. In contrast to a focus on women's moral and kinship strategies in response to health‐driven distress, I foreground women's exertion as an embodied strategy they adopted to safeguard households as a whole. Attending to exertion adds a new dimension to understanding women's practices in response to hardship – that of using their health to pursue long‐term outcomes they value, in this case household reproduction.
{"title":"‘As long as I can’: women's health, physical exertion, and household futures in rural Indian Himalayas","authors":"Nishtha Tewari","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70019","url":null,"abstract":"Through an ethnography of exertion, this article adds to anthropological literature on the actions and interpretations of marginalized groups in response to social hardship and suffering. It argues that, against a reduction in social and state‐support mechanisms in Eastern Uttarakhand, north India, women consciously used physical exertion to achieve household stability. Exertion manifested as arduous paid labour, which strengthened household positions and prospects, alongside unpaid physical service, which sustained inter‐household and extended social relationships. Women's most reliable resource towards reproducing a collective future was their continuous physical labour – which led them to intentionally deprioritize their immediate, individual health concerns. Caste and class networks shaped the possibilities and risks of exertion. Despite women's efforts, exertion had its limits and was sometimes fallible. Women responded to these limits by adopting self‐reliance as a discursive measure to calibrate their exertion. In contrast to a focus on women's moral and kinship strategies in response to health‐driven distress, I foreground women's exertion as an embodied strategy they adopted to safeguard households as a whole. Attending to exertion adds a new dimension to understanding women's practices in response to hardship – that of using their health to pursue long‐term outcomes they value, in this case household reproduction.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145765152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"INDEX to THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"31 4","pages":"1143-1149"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145659464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anthropologists have recently become inspired, captivated even, by the practices of the arts, design, and architecture in efforts to renew anthropology's modes of engagement and understandings of its relevance, particularly affecting how we approach ethnographic fieldwork. Having each worked for well over a decade at these crossroads, the authors reflect on a search for anthropological relevance undertaken through collaborative materializations of the field, in situations where anthropologists go beyond gestures of cultural critique and participant observation. This entails creating hosting environments where our counterparts turn not just into co‐ethnographers or co‐thinkers, but also and mainly into ethnographic guests. The idea is familiar in a discipline rooted in forcing uninvited visits on hosts around the world. However, in our material explorations, we envision a different route. For us, hosting, as a mode of inquiry, provides openings to a more inviting anthropology, involving zones of mutual uncertainty among a multiplicity of actors so as to instil generative puzzlement without imposing our discipline on others. We conclude by making a plea for practising anthropology as a field of invitations in hopes of remaking worlds together with our ethnographic guests.
{"title":"For an inviting anthropology","authors":"Tomás Criado, Francisco Martínez, Eeva Berglund","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70017","url":null,"abstract":"Anthropologists have recently become inspired, captivated even, by the practices of the arts, design, and architecture in efforts to renew anthropology's modes of engagement and understandings of its relevance, particularly affecting how we approach ethnographic fieldwork. Having each worked for well over a decade at these crossroads, the authors reflect on a search for anthropological relevance undertaken through collaborative materializations of the field, in situations where anthropologists go beyond gestures of cultural critique and participant observation. This entails creating hosting environments where our counterparts turn not just into co‐ethnographers or co‐thinkers, but also and mainly into ethnographic guests. The idea is familiar in a discipline rooted in forcing uninvited visits on hosts around the world. However, in our material explorations, we envision a different route. For us, hosting, as a mode of inquiry, provides openings to a more inviting anthropology, involving zones of mutual uncertainty among a multiplicity of actors so as to instil generative puzzlement without imposing our discipline on others. We conclude by making a plea for practising anthropology as a field of invitations in hopes of remaking worlds together with our ethnographic guests.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145619425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Loose sediments structure the deep history of the youngest Himalayas, Churia, in Nepal. In the 1950s geological surveys of Nepal, the sediments of Churia featured as geologically loose , erodible, and fluviatile with scarce economic possibilities. By 1970, however, these sediments emerged as spatial compositions of key construction aggregates in the Tarai floodplains, generating immense political anxiety on the loose nature of their regulation and governance at the riverine sites of extraction. This article examines how the mobilization of Churia's geological history became the grounds for sand extraction from the Tarai riverbeds, eventually converting the fluviatile sedimentary cartographies into regulated domains of governance. I rely on the previously overlooked archival documents, labour participation, and ethnographic evidence on the sediments’ histories, characteristics, movements, and extraction to advance anthropology's timely concern with colonial geology, territorial control, and spatial mapping of geological history, economy, and governance. Yet, these anthropological concerns have kept the subterranean materiality largely fixed, rarely anchoring the critical role of a movable geology into extractive governance spaces. My research intervenes here to argue that the governance mechanisms in Nepal have used Churia's fluvial geology to legitimize riverbed extraction in the Tarai.
{"title":"Loose sediments: history, geology, and sand mining in Nepal's Himalayan‐Tarai rivers","authors":"Saumya Pandey","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70016","url":null,"abstract":"Loose sediments structure the deep history of the youngest Himalayas, Churia, in Nepal. In the 1950s geological surveys of Nepal, the sediments of Churia featured as geologically <jats:italic>loose</jats:italic> , erodible, and fluviatile with scarce economic possibilities. By 1970, however, these sediments emerged as spatial compositions of key construction aggregates in the Tarai floodplains, generating immense political anxiety on the <jats:italic>loose</jats:italic> nature of their regulation and governance at the riverine sites of extraction. This article examines how the mobilization of Churia's geological history became the grounds for sand extraction from the Tarai riverbeds, eventually converting the fluviatile sedimentary cartographies into regulated domains of governance. I rely on the previously overlooked archival documents, labour participation, and ethnographic evidence on the sediments’ histories, characteristics, movements, and extraction to advance anthropology's timely concern with colonial geology, territorial control, and spatial mapping of geological history, economy, and governance. Yet, these anthropological concerns have kept the subterranean materiality largely fixed, rarely anchoring the critical role of a movable geology into extractive governance spaces. My research intervenes here to argue that the governance mechanisms in Nepal have used Churia's fluvial geology to legitimize riverbed extraction in the Tarai.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145613424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The production‐distribution‐consumption triad has structured how anthropologists understand exchange for roughly a century. This article argues for expanding this triad to include an explicit focus on acquisition – the systems, processes, and practices of acquiring. Acquisition also calls into question the linearity of the production‐distribution‐consumption chain, as acquisition takes place at different points and to various ends. Drawing on research in Cuba and Los Angeles, this article analyses food acquisition practices among these two relatively food‐insecure communities, revealing the ways ethnographically grounded questions like ‘Where did you get that?’ or ‘How did you get that?’ can illuminate the complexities of acquisition and robust forms of meaning‐making and intersubjective interaction that surround acquisition. Ultimately, this article argues that an anthropology of acquisition is uniquely positioned to illuminate aspects of subjectivity, identity production, political stance, and other forms of meaning‐making associated with materiality. An anthropology of acquisition offers greater possibility for understanding the unequal experience of supply chains and distribution networks, as well as the possibilities for individual agency and assertion of preference in the process of consumption.
{"title":"Towards an anthropology of acquisition: ‘How did you get that?’","authors":"Hanna Garth","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70015","url":null,"abstract":"The production‐distribution‐consumption triad has structured how anthropologists understand exchange for roughly a century. This article argues for expanding this triad to include an explicit focus on <jats:italic>acquisition</jats:italic> – the systems, processes, and practices of acquiring. Acquisition also calls into question the linearity of the production‐distribution‐consumption chain, as acquisition takes place at different points and to various ends. Drawing on research in Cuba and Los Angeles, this article analyses food acquisition practices among these two relatively food‐insecure communities, revealing the ways ethnographically grounded questions like ‘Where did you get that?’ or ‘How did you get that?’ can illuminate the complexities of acquisition and robust forms of meaning‐making and intersubjective interaction that surround acquisition. Ultimately, this article argues that an anthropology of acquisition is uniquely positioned to illuminate aspects of subjectivity, identity production, political stance, and other forms of meaning‐making associated with materiality. An anthropology of acquisition offers greater possibility for understanding the unequal experience of supply chains and distribution networks, as well as the possibilities for individual agency and assertion of preference in the process of consumption.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"107 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145553566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the activities of daily life in a village neighbouring the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima. It argues that one of the potentials of taking a dwelling perspective – a phenomenological approach to living within the ecological and social environments – emerges most compellingly within a polluted landscape. The 2011 nuclear accident abruptly recast residents’ daily routines in the village, historically tied to the surrounding environment, into sites of potential radiation exposure. Despite this, residents have resumed practices of growing vegetables and gathering wild edibles for self‐consumption, reshaping their relationships with the landscape. The perception of toxicity visualized through radiation‐measuring techno‐scientific devices is interwoven with sensory experiences, everyday knowledge of foodstuff, local habitats, and socio‐natural geography, forming a vernacular knowledge for living in the now‐altered environment. People also repurpose materials, including post‐disaster waste, to work on their habitation spaces. Pollution disrupts the notion of the frictionless circuit between body and environment, undermining the secured sense of being‐in‐the‐world. The dwelling perspective highlights these frictions and disruptions, and people's various responses to them through daily, routine practices. This reveals how the power structure underlying the uneven distribution of pollution impacts the everyday physical sphere and how people react within it.
{"title":"Dwelling in a post‐fallout landscape: re‐shaping and sustaining life in a former evacuation zone in Fukushima","authors":"Tomoko Sakai","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70013","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the activities of daily life in a village neighbouring the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima. It argues that one of the potentials of taking a dwelling perspective – a phenomenological approach to living within the ecological and social environments – emerges most compellingly within a polluted landscape. The 2011 nuclear accident abruptly recast residents’ daily routines in the village, historically tied to the surrounding environment, into sites of potential radiation exposure. Despite this, residents have resumed practices of growing vegetables and gathering wild edibles for self‐consumption, reshaping their relationships with the landscape. The perception of toxicity visualized through radiation‐measuring techno‐scientific devices is interwoven with sensory experiences, everyday knowledge of foodstuff, local habitats, and socio‐natural geography, forming a vernacular knowledge for living in the now‐altered environment. People also repurpose materials, including post‐disaster waste, to work on their habitation spaces. Pollution disrupts the notion of the frictionless circuit between body and environment, undermining the secured sense of being‐in‐the‐world. The dwelling perspective highlights these frictions and disruptions, and people's various responses to them through daily, routine practices. This reveals how the power structure underlying the uneven distribution of pollution impacts the everyday physical sphere and how people react within it.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145553565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What do communicating with a baby, with an animal, and with an ancestor have in common? In all three cases, people engage in opaque communication that is far from the standard psycholinguistic model of transparent interaction based on shared intentionality. Yet, these asymmetrical situations are usual for many human groups who live in hybrid communities, including pets, livestock, idols, spirits, and others. This article argues that the willingness to create nonverbal codes and make kin beyond linguistic humanity (with infants, animals, and deities) is a characteristic of the hybrid sociality of Homo adoptans . Our ontological polyglossia is not a deviance but a unique feature of human social skills. Based on ethnographic examples from different contexts, this article explores how people communicate and weave sociality at the border of humanity and beyond: with babies, with animals, and with the invisible.
{"title":"Ontological polyglossia: the art of communicating in opacity*","authors":"Charles Stépanoff","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70010","url":null,"abstract":"What do communicating with a baby, with an animal, and with an ancestor have in common? In all three cases, people engage in opaque communication that is far from the standard psycholinguistic model of transparent interaction based on shared intentionality. Yet, these asymmetrical situations are usual for many human groups who live in hybrid communities, including pets, livestock, idols, spirits, and others. This article argues that the willingness to create nonverbal codes and make kin beyond linguistic humanity (with infants, animals, and deities) is a characteristic of the hybrid sociality of <jats:italic>Homo adoptans</jats:italic> . Our ontological polyglossia is not a deviance but a unique feature of human social skills. Based on ethnographic examples from different contexts, this article explores how people communicate and weave sociality at the border of humanity and beyond: with babies, with animals, and with the invisible.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hair is an integral part of the skin's interface and has sensory capacity. It actively contributes to processes of bodily materialization and facilitates transactional exchange with other social actors and environments, particularly regarding energies and vibrations that can be perceived as subtle matter. Many Surinamese Hindus conceptualize practices such as cutting, shaving, and tying hair as ways to reduce the body's connectivity to other entities. In this context, hair serves as a means of regulating the body's boundaries, which are understood to be based on a dynamic, energetic state. From this perspective, hair can enhance the body's openness, particularly during processes like pregnancy and mediumship, which require heightened sensitivity and increased permeability. To balance and maintain these ‘hot’ and ‘sensitive’ bodies, practices that cool the body, including specific hair modifications, are employed. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Suriname and the Netherlands, this article argues that since bodies are always in a state of exchange, they require not only the maintenance of boundaries but also acts of separation. In this context, shaving the head during rites of passage is seen as a means of separation, particularly during significant transitions such as the gradual process of birth.
{"title":"Hair as sensory skin: sensitive bodies, ritual shaving, and the maintenance of bodily boundaries in Hindu Suriname","authors":"Sinah Theres Kloß","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70012","url":null,"abstract":"Hair is an integral part of the skin's interface and has sensory capacity. It actively contributes to processes of bodily materialization and facilitates transactional exchange with other social actors and environments, particularly regarding energies and vibrations that can be perceived as subtle matter. Many Surinamese Hindus conceptualize practices such as cutting, shaving, and tying hair as ways to reduce the body's connectivity to other entities. In this context, hair serves as a means of regulating the body's boundaries, which are understood to be based on a dynamic, energetic state. From this perspective, hair can enhance the body's openness, particularly during processes like pregnancy and mediumship, which require heightened sensitivity and increased permeability. To balance and maintain these ‘hot’ and ‘sensitive’ bodies, practices that cool the body, including specific hair modifications, are employed. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Suriname and the Netherlands, this article argues that since bodies are always in a state of exchange, they require not only the maintenance of boundaries but also acts of separation. In this context, shaving the head during rites of passage is seen as a means of separation, particularly during significant transitions such as the gradual process of birth.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"82 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses a new wealth tax (the IGF) in Bolivia against the backdrop of the 2019 ousting of former president Evo Morales. In doing so, it engages calls for ‘a return to politics’ in anthropology by proposing the notion of a ‘fiscal grievance politics’ as animating elite opposition to the tax in lowland Santa Cruz department. I show that the effects of the tax exceed its narrow scope, the revenue it generates, or the allocation of that revenue by activating lowland elites as liberal, vigilant taxpayers. As such, these elites fold the wealth tax into a wider set of racialized grievances, including over public education and the wider production of history, that have taken centre stage with the coup against the Morales government and its fallout. Interrogating why the IGF is so available to this more expansive grievance politics, I argue that this involves assertions of white ownership of tax that are foundational to the peculiar, racially circumscribed form of democracy which liberalism aspires to elaborate at a planetary scale. As taxation becomes a key material and symbolic axis of white grievance, I conclude that it offers critical vantage points for a revamped political anthropology.
{"title":"Fiscal grievance politics: wealth taxation and master‐race democracy in post‐coup Bolivia","authors":"Charles Dolph","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70011","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses a new wealth tax (the IGF) in Bolivia against the backdrop of the 2019 ousting of former president Evo Morales. In doing so, it engages calls for ‘a return to politics’ in anthropology by proposing the notion of a ‘fiscal grievance politics’ as animating elite opposition to the tax in lowland Santa Cruz department. I show that the effects of the tax exceed its narrow scope, the revenue it generates, or the allocation of that revenue by activating lowland elites as liberal, vigilant taxpayers. As such, these elites fold the wealth tax into a wider set of racialized grievances, including over public education and the wider production of history, that have taken centre stage with the coup against the Morales government and its fallout. Interrogating why the IGF is so available to this more expansive grievance politics, I argue that this involves assertions of white ownership of tax that are foundational to the peculiar, racially circumscribed form of democracy which liberalism aspires to elaborate at a planetary scale. As taxation becomes a key material and symbolic axis of white grievance, I conclude that it offers critical vantage points for a revamped political anthropology.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145472998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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