Justice in the Vernacular: An Anthropological Critique of Commensuration

This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedures that flatten the underlying complexities. Commensuration, in this sense, takes place at all levels: local, subnational, national, and international. At each stage, the process of “measuring justice” through commensuration has the paradoxical effect of becoming more precise as variables become more detached from the nuances of everyday conflicts. In Merry’s analysis, the global “seductions of quantification” reinforce the dominance of commensurability as an ideology of both scientific validity and social change. Drawing on both Merry’s work and wider comparative research in the anthropology of human rights and justice, this contribution to the symposium argues that the anthropological critique of commensuration carries important lessons for the meanings of “justice” more generally. How can justice be measured at a global level if, as Merry’s research shows, the underlying factors that supposedly reflect injustice are highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable? As a potential way out of this dilemma, the article explores the possibilities of conceptualizing “justice” in the vernacular, an approach grounded in local cultural and ethical realities.