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.

本文探讨了莎莉·恩格尔·梅里对人权衡量和监测的开创性多地点研究的深远影响。正如她所说，构成衡量基础的人权指标取决于高度复杂且很大程度上模糊的比较过程。通过比较，复杂的社会、法律和经济现象被视为可以使用统计程序来衡量的变量，从而消除潜在的复杂性。从这个意义上说，补偿发生在各个层面：地方、次国家、国家和国际。在每个阶段，通过比较来“衡量正义”的过程都会产生矛盾的效果，即随着变量变得更加脱离日常冲突的细微差别，它就会变得更加精确。在梅里的分析中，全球“量化的诱惑”强化了可通约性作为科学有效性和社会变革意识形态的主导地位。借鉴梅里的工作和人权与正义人类学更广泛的比较研究，这篇对研讨会的贡献认为，人类学对相称的批判为更普遍的“正义”的含义提供了重要的教训。正如梅里的研究表明，如果被认为反映不公正的根本因素是高度具体的、偶然的，而且最重要的是，不可通约的，那么如何在全球范围内衡量正义呢？作为摆脱这一困境的潜在出路，本文探讨了用白话来概念化“正义”的可能性，这是一种植根于当地文化和伦理现实的方法。