Fiscal Disobedience

by Roitman, Janet L.

• ISBN13: 9780691118697
• ISBN10: 0691118698
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-15
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Fiscal Disobediencerepresents a novel approach to the question of citizenship amid the changing global economy and the fiscal crisis of the nation-state. Focusing on economic practices in the Chad Basin of Africa, Janet Roitman combines thorough ethnographic fieldwork with sophisticated analysis of key ideas of political economy to examine the contentious nature of fiscal relationships between the state and its citizens. She argues that citizenship is being redefined through a renegotiation of the rights and obligations inherent in such economic relationships. The book centers on a civil disobedience movement that arose in Cameroon beginning in 1990 ostensibly to counter state fiscal authority--a movement dubbedOpeacute;ration Villes Mortesby the opposition andincivisme fiscalby the government (which for its part was eager to suggest that participants were less than legitimate citizens, failing in their civic duties). Contrary to standard approaches, Roitman examines this conflict as a "productive moment" that, rather than involving the outright rejection of regulatory authority, questioned the intelligibility of its exercise. Although both militarized commercial networks (associated with such activities trading in contraband goods including drugs, ivory, and guns) and highly organized gang-based banditry do challenge state authority, they do not necessarily undermine state power. Contrary to depictions of the African state as "weak" or "failed," this book demonstrates how the state in Africa manages to reconstitute its authority through networks that have emerged in the interstices of the state system. It also shows how those networks partake of the same epistemological grounding as does the state. Indeed, both state and nonstate practices of governing refer to a common "ethic of illegality," which explains how illegal activities are understood as licit or reasonable conduct.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: An Anthropology of Regulation and Fiscal Relations	1	(22)
Claims to Wealth: Incivisme Fiscal	3	(3)
The Concepts and Targets of Regulation	6	(8)
Dispossession and Wealth Creation: The Ambivalent Grounds of the Fiscal Subject	14	(4)
The Pluralization of Regulatory Authority	18	(5)
Incivisme Fiscal	23	(25)
An Event	23	(2)
Claims to the State and to the Market	25	(6)
Enacting Claims to Wealth	31	(6)
National Integrity: Peace or Wealth?	37	(11)
Tax-Price as a Technique of Government	48	(25)
Instituting French Colonial Currency: Manque d'argent, Mal d'argent	50	(10)
Consumer Protection: The Enlightened Consumer, or Taxpayer	60	(6)
Tax as Price	66	(7)
Unsanctioned Wealth, or the Productivity of Debt	73	(27)
When Is It Debt? When Is It Wealth?	73	(6)
The Truth of Price	79	(4)
Agreement about the Truth: Narral and Socially Sanctioned Wealth	83	(5)
Indivisibility: The Basis of Accounting and Redistribution	88	(5)
Seizure: Enacting Claims to Social Mobility and Redistribution	93	(2)
Le Voleur Imprenable	95	(5)
Fixing the Moving Targets of Regulation	100	(29)
The Changing Foundations of Wealth	100	(3)
Dominion without Presence: Political Mediation through Tribute and Alliance	103	(8)
Spoils as Licit Wealth: The Rise of the Sokoto Caliphate	111	(10)
The Frontiers of Wealth Creation: Regulating the Bush	121	(8)
The Unstable Terms of Regulatory Practice	129	(22)
The Colonial Census	130	(9)
The Population Flottante	139	(7)
The Intermediaries	146	(5)
The Pluralization of Regulatory Authority	151	(49)
Unregulated Commerce and Road Banditry: A Day's Work	152	(12)
The Contest of Regulatory Authority	164	(13)
The Intelligibility of Seizure and Tax: Practices of Government on the Margins and in the Norm	177	(15)
Power Is Not Sovereign	192	(6)
Appendix: Original French Letter	198	(2)
Conclusion	200	(7)
References	207	(20)
Index	227