her land, such that it risks becoming overgrown, loses it to the village community. The criterion of measurement for this is when “two oxen will lose sight of each other in the new forest” ( Grimm [1828] 1992: 128) . 1 In a more industrialized setting
Temperature and Capital
Measuring the Future with Quantified Heat
Scott W. Schwartz
more interesting. My concern with the politicization of measurement is not centered on quotidian debates over the reality of anthropogenic climate change that pervade cable news and blogs, or whether or not we reside in the Anthropocene or Holocene
Scale and Number
Framing an Ideology of Pastoral Plenty in Rural Mongolia
Joseph Bristley
2002 ) to reflections on how scale making produces anthropological knowledge by yielding “sets of internal measurements and hence coordinates along which the scale of phenomena may be changed” ( Strathern [1991] 2004: xvi ; cf. Holbraad and Pedersen
Dan Brockington
The imperatives of measurement seem particularly prominent in today’s social environmental concerns. This is partly because of the problems different societies and international bodies have set themselves to solve. Whether these be the monitoring
Social Quality Measurement and Perceived Social Quality
The Case of Peshawar, Pakistan
Muhammad Yasir Ali and Ka Lin
quality of their life as a whole. This evaluation can be made with the measurements of objective indicators such as economic conditions, access to and quality of basic living facilities, and so on. However, subjective indicators of the measurements should
Pamela McElwee
defining and measuring ES, and how decisions about measurement may result in specific types of outcomes, such as commodification. Attention to measurement, standards, and indicators has grown in the larger social science literature, often emerging out of
Designing a New Method of Studying Feature-Length Films
An Empirical Study and its Critical Analysis
Jose Cañas-Bajo, Teresa Cañas-Bajo, Eleni Berki, Juri-Petri Valtanen, and Pertti Saariluoma
view of film to an objectivist and measurement-based analysis of experience and acceptance without limiting the analyses of the viewers’ cognitive and emotional experiences to short clips or sequences. Despite the growing interest in understanding the
Diversity Measurement and Protection of Confidential Data
The Ten Recommendations of the CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés)
French Data Protection Authority. These recommendations were issued as part of the Commission’s report of 16 May 2007 entitled Mesure de la diversité et protection des données personnelles. The entire report is available at http://www.cnil.fr/index. php?id=2219.
The “Democracy-Politics Paradox”
The Dynamics of Political Alienation
Gerry Stoker and Mark Evans
Contemporary political scientists have observed a democratic paradox that has crystallized around the disconnection between how citizens imagine their democracy and how politics is practiced. Citizens continue to believe in the values of liberal democracy but are increasingly disillusioned with how their political systems work and the politics that are practiced in the name of democracy. This article revisits the root causes of political alienation to better understand this democratic paradox. It provides both a conceptual understanding of political alienation and its domain of action and insights into how the concept can be operationalized and measured in empirical research. It argues that while democracy itself may not be in crisis, the politics on which its operation rests is in peril.
Negotiating Uncertainty
Neo-liberal Statecraft in Contemporary Peru
Annabel Pinker and Penny Harvey
In this article, we deploy the concept of 'affect' to explore processes of state formation in contemporary Peru. Drawing on ethnography concerning a controversial engineering project in the Sacred Valley, we show how the state emerges as an affective force in the ambivalent spaces opened up by the slippages between the stable certainties promised by regulatory frameworks and the doubts generated by the ambiguities they pose. Tracing the tensions, gestures, and tiny shifts in perspective that punctuate an encounter between engineers and local politicians, we complicate the notion that a pre-existing state induces affects in political subjects. Instead, we show how the state emerges as a virtual force—neither quite present nor absent—in an uncertain, highly political field of negotiation.