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
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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Resources
Digitalizing land administration: The geographies and temporalities of infrastructural promise
Daivi Rodima-Taylor article, Geoforum 2021
Promise, Ethnography, and the Anthropocene: Investigating the Infrastructural Turn
Daivi Rodima-Taylor's review article, American Anthropologist, 2020
Land, Property, Technology: Exploring Blockchain as Infrastructural Promise
Daivi Rodima-Taylor's blog article for the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing, 2021
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