Fiscal Disobedience

An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa

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by Janet L. Roitman,

Edited by Paul Rabinow

Princeton University Press

Due/Published December 2004, 216 pages, paper

ISBN 0691118701

"I very much enjoyed reading this book, both for its originality and the seminal way its author links vivid ethnography to sophisticated theoretical reflections. Janet Roitman worked in a very special area, the Chad basin, which is dominated by ongoing civil war, an almost complete informalization of the economy, and spectacular forms of smuggling. She admirably succeeds in showing that even in such an apparently chaotic context new patterns of control and regularity emerge that give terms like 'economy' a special tenor. The prose is highly accessible, not only because of its clarity of style but also because the author, in a very evocative way, constantly returns to the realities she examined during her fieldwork."--Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam, author of "The Modernity of Witchcraft

"Janet Roitman's is a major and original voice. An unusually innovative, indeed subversive anthropology of economy and state, her book contains fascinating debates and engagements with a wide variety of issues that arise from the historical ethnography of an African region but are clearly of general interest."--Arjun Appadurai, New School University, author of "Modernity at Large