Data stitching: Fiscal data sociality in rural Bangladesh

This paper examines how fiscal data practices shape citizen-state relations in rural Bangladesh through an ethnography of a social enterprise's experiment to digitalize holding tax in one locality, situated amidst wider Digital Bangladesh reforms. Fiscal data sociality describes how taxation is lived and contested through data artefacts such as receipts, logbooks and spreadsheets. Data stitching names the relational labour through which fiscal data become legitimate and bearable in everyday life. Drawing on South Asian moral grammars of kachchā and s´uddho, I argue that digitalization sharpens struggles over which relational truths become data, heightening the risk of technocratic extraction when recognition is stripped away. The analysis shows data to be a moral technology, whose authority depends on the controlled exposure of social life.