Rate My Professor Greg Rawlings

Associate Professor Greg Rawlings serves in the Social Anthropology Programme within the School of Social Sciences, Division of Humanities at the University of Otago, where he has held his position since June 2007. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University in 2003, following 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Pango village, Vanuatu. Earlier in his career, from 2002 to 2005, Rawlings was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Tax System Integrity at the ANU, where he conducted multi-sited research on tax compliance in Australia, offshore finance in locations such as Andorra, Guernsey, Samoa, and Singapore, and money laundering in the Netherlands. Subsequently, from 2006 to 2007, he lectured in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the ANU, focusing on applied anthropological projects related to governance and oversight institutions in the Pacific.

Rawlings' academic interests encompass globalisation, transnationalism, citizenship, statelessness, political, legal, and economic anthropology, as well as the history and anthropology interface and the anthropology of taxation, tax havens, and offshore finance centres. His key publications include "Tax havens, commodified citizenship, and the production of home in a globalised world" (2024, in Anthropology and Tax), "From capitation taxes to tax havens: British fiscal policies in a colonial island world" (2022, in Imperial Inequalities), "Stateless persons, eligible citizens and protected places: The British Nationality Act in Vanuatu" (2019, Twentieth Century British History), "Shifting profits and hidden accounts: Regulating tax havens" (2017, in Regulatory Theory), and "Asymmetrical ambiguities: The 'White Australia policy', travel, migration and citizenship in Vanuatu, 1945-1953" (2017, in Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific). He has contributed articles to journals such as History & Anthropology, The Journal of Pacific History, and TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology. In recognition of his supervision excellence, Rawlings received the Top Humanities Supervisor of the Year award at the University of Otago in 2011. From 2019 to 2023, he was Head of the Social Anthropology Programme.