What is it about?

Examining the case of blockchain-based land governance, the article explores the tensions between the ambitious visions and actual scales of implementation around the redistributional promises of distributed ledger technologies. Bringing together the concepts of ‘imaginaries’ and ‘infrastructures’, it analyzes blockchain-based land governance in the Global South and the metaverse.

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Why is it important?

The social effects of blockchain-based projects must be thoroughly understood. This includes studying the shared visions and narratives that these sociotechnical interventions evoke, as well as analyzing the complex infrastructural entanglements of these often ambitious imaginaries. Nodes of intermediation and control often do not simply disappear as distributed digital ledgers are applied within and across different cultures in ways that can solidify rather than overturn inequities of earlier historical periods.

Perspectives

Ultimately, we should not view blockchain-based land governance in physical and virtual universes as disconnected. There is an urgency for systematically examining the interconnections of the digital blockchain realm with land through its entanglements in imaginary, virtual and physical worlds.

Daivi Rodima-Taylor

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Reimagining blockchain in a pluriversal world: Digital land governance in the Global South and the metaverse, Anthropology Today, July 2023, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8322.12828.
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