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The article takes a close look at Jacob Grimm’s astonishing account of measurement in his lesser-known studies on the history of law. Grimm gives a thorough description of concrete quantification of property and the measurement of economic value in a European rural setting. Both techniques are considered a necessary ‘infrastructure’ for any use of money, yet his exposition is curiously devoid of numbers. Instead, ‘poetic’ and procedural scripts of measurement take center stage. However, these qualitative procedures are not contrasted to quantitative ones in any expectable way. In Grimm’s polemic, precise quantification emerges as a shorthand for administrative regimes that circumvent and prohibit negotiation, appearing to be less rational and more socially binding.

The quantification of human environments has a history—a relatively short history. This article explores how the notion of quantifiable reality has become naturalized through the privileging of predictive utility as the primary goal of knowledge production. This theme is examined via the invention and application of temperature— how it was sociomaterially constructed and how it is globally restructuring social organization today. Temperature does not exist pervasively throughout all space and time. Physicists may affirm that fluctuations in relative heat are ubiquitous, but as a measurement of these fluctuations, temperature only emerges through arrangements of political and environmental observations. What phenomena do populations deem worthy of observation? How do populations manipulate materials to make such observations? By tracing the origins of thermometry and investigating modern efforts to reconstruct and model ulterior temperatures, I illustrate that temperatures, like other measurements, are cultural artifacts pliable to sociopolitical efforts of control and domination.

Much recent anthropology reflects on how scales are contested and contingent products of heterogeneous social interactions, not the ‘ontological givens’ (sensu Carr and Lempert) described in earlier scholarship. This article examines the importance of number in the formation of scales of measurement. It does so regarding a pastoral Mongolian scale of livestock-counting based on the number ten thousand, or tüm[en]: a qualitative-cum-quantitative term suggesting plenty and abundance. Drawing on literature on the anthropology of number, and bringing it into dialogue with studies of scale and ideology, this article argues that number is not just a means for calibrating pre-existing scales. Instead, as something endowed with particular qualities and conceptual stability, number can be mobilized to produce ideologically charged scales of measurement.

Measuring and being measured are some of the fundamental aspects of our worlds. Without them, we cannot live in our environments or function as social beings. But how we measure, and are measured, and to what ends and purposes, matters a great deal. Measurement does not just record; it shapes, changes, and constitutes things. It is not merely descriptive. It is creative. This introduction to the special issue explores how these themes of measurement are played out in diverse settings, including counting fish stocks, migration, social resilience, local measures of sustainability, oil exploitation, forest conservation, calculating ecosystem services, and measuring heat. Collectively, they provide a better understanding of how crucial measurements are formulated, and how they are and can be contested.

This study investigates the difference between the maps of social quality and perceived social quality. Using survey data collected from Peshawar, a prominent city in Pakistan, we compare the general and the perceived maps of social quality drawn from survey respondents based on their stands of income, education, age, and gender. With this comparison, the study conducts the regression analysis about the data to reveal the relations between these factors and draw some policy implications. The analysis contrasting objective and subjective visions of the social quality map may support a constructionist view on social quality and, more essentially, bring our view into the diversity of the perceived maps of social quality in reference to the interests of different social groups in society.

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.

Measuring viewers’ experiences of films has become a critical issue for filmmakers because all kinds of audiences now have access to new releases from all over the world. Some approaches have focused on the cognitive level of the experience, while others have emphasized the structure of films. Additionally, some have used quantitative objective methods to examine audience reactions to short film sequences, while others have applied qualitative approaches to study feature-length films. However, an integrated method that combines the features of these approaches is needed. In this article, we describe a new method that combines quantitative and qualitative data to study viewers’ experiences of different structural features of films. This method involves an online subjective response mechanism that can be used to capture and measure the experiences of different target audiences as they watch movies of different lengths.

Ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly used as the conceptual driver for conservation and development actions, largely following from the influential Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Scholars skeptical of the neoliberal turn in conservation have critiqued the use of economic values for nature’s services. What has been less well understood and reviewed, however, is how concepts of ES are enacted by technologies of calculation, as well as how calculative practices move through networks and among stakeholders. This review traces how definitions and metrics of ES have evolved and how they are used, such as in biodiversity offsetting and wetland mitigation programs. Using the idea of the creation and deployment of calculative mechanisms, this article discusses how these processes proceed in different ES contexts, assesses what work has to happen ontologically to make ES commensurable and circulatable, and speculates on what the opportunities for future pathways other than commodification are.

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.

This article analyzes the international development of voluntary biodiversity offsets, a conservation instrument that permits developers to pursue their activities if conservation actions are undertaken elsewhere to compensate for the environmental impacts of their projects. Largely undertaken by extractive industries that operate in the global South where no offsetting regulations exist, this tool is currently attracting growing interest from policy makers, private companies, financial institutions, and conservation experts. Building upon the concept of market framing developed by Callon (1998), I explore in what contexts and through what processes this idea has gathered momentum, as well as the disturbing gap between the way it has been framed and its practical implementation. It is suggested that once immersed in the outside world, the market framing of offsets appears as a fragile result dependent upon substantial investments, which casts serious doubts about offsets' ability to reduce biodiversity loss on technical, governance, and social grounds.