Miranda Sheild Johansson

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at UCL Anthropology. Her current project explores the social dynamics of fiscal systems in Bolivia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. She is the co-editor of the volume Anthropology and Tax: Ethnographies of Fiscal Relations (CUP 2024), and a founder and convenor of the EASA Tax Network. She has also published on themes of extortion, the social contract, agricultural labour and the value of transformation. Miranda's research has been funded by the UKRI, ESRC, and Leverhulme Trust.

My field setting

Cochabamba Department is in central Bolivia. Diverse in altitude and climate, the department includes provinces on the high altiplano as well as the lower Chapare region, famous for its coca growing. The main city, Cochabamba, is a fast-expanding urban area, with lots of seasonal migration and one of the largest open-air markets in Latin America. While historically an agricultural centre, Cochabamba now has a large service industry, both formal and informal, as well as being centre for illegal imports and the cocaine trade. I have done fieldwork in rural and urban areas of Cochabamba since 2007, exploring work and tax.

My key research questions

I am interested in when and why fiscal relationships are experienced as extortive. In Bolivia, tax histories are deeply rooted in colonial feudal logics, where taxes were paid to the authorities to protect land from expropriation from the same authorities. My research also asks how extortion sociality is embedded in everyday business relationships in a context where informality dominates. How do people gain leverage to extort in these business relationships and how are fiscal and legal structures part of this leverage?

My research findings

Amongst my interlocutors, who run businesses that act both formally and informally, everyday extortion was part of managing relationships with state actors, colleagues, and competitors. People leveraged the law, including labour legislation, and the fiscal system, to extort others. The extorter would threaten to report breaches of labour law and tax evasion to gain unfair advantage. In my peri-urban fieldsite this way of doing business was widespread and something many people engaged with. Notably, this extortion happened between actors who were relatively equal in power status so did not rely on pre-existing power differentials. My research has also explored perceptions of taxpayers and their rejection of social contract logics. My interlocutors paid some taxes, such as property tax, but rarely others, such as VAT. Their approach to the fiscal exchange with the state deviates from classic political economy understandings of the relationship between taxes and state-society relations. Partly because of histories of tax extraction, and because of their local economies, taxes paid are not envisaged as bringing them closer to the state, instead they act as a way of keeping the state at distance.

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