아프리카ㆍ중동

Following publication of Thomas Piketty’s (Citation2014) Capital in the 21st Century, economic inequality has attracted great attention, and not only in the discipline of economics. Anthropologists have focused on the licitness or legitimacy of economic inequality, showing that some forms of inequality are socially sanctioned whilst others are not. For example, in Sweden, a country known for its low income inequality, high income taxes are widely accepted and seen as a civic duty (Larsen Citation2017) whilst there is considerable antipathy towards inheritance tax (Sheild Johansson Citation2020), leading to high wealth inequality. What anthropologists have not studied, however, is how wealth inequality might differ across social groups, and the cultural and political dynamics that might legitimize such disparities. In economics, race and gender have also been overlooked in studies of wealth inequality (Boushey Citation2017).