Introduction

Abstract

This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of a concept of commensuration that goes beyond issues of metrics per se, but without diffusing itself into a general metaphor for cultural difference. Commensuration, we argue, is not just a basic psychosocial process, but has also emerged, in the context of “globalization” with its multifarious and wide-ranging flows, as an ideological value in its own right. Explicit negotiations of commensuration, then, have become increasingly fraught, increasingly pivotal practices as group boundaries of all sorts—separating ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, nations, or “civilizations”—are relentlessly re-erected and re-arranged on the miniscule ethnographic scale of everyday engagements with semiotic forms marked as coming from beyond those boundaries. After laying out the nuts and bolts of our approach, we explore commensuration (and introduce the subsequent collection of essays) via three topical foci: commensuration’s role in securing movement as a semiotic effect; how sovereign power authorizes commensuration and thus comes to be at stake in it; and, finally, the destabilizing and yet productive ways in which failure haunts commensurative projects.

Hybrid language practices on Turkey’s national Kurdish television station: Iconic perspectives on form

“…Such was the impetus behind the establishment of the Académie française (Cooper 1996), which served as a model for The Turkish Language Academy (Türk Dil Kurumu) (Schluter and Sansarkan 2014). Efforts to defend the legitimacy of Kurdish as a language that is commensurate (Hankins and Yeh 2016) to Turkish borrow from these examples that place importance on the language in the context of prestigious written genres.…”

“…According to Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes (2011), linguistic purism helps to further language activists' aims through its presentation of a language that is distinct from the dominant variety but is, nevertheless, of equal legitimacy. A commensurate (Hankins and Yeh 2016) and clearly defined code creates a more compelling case for protection by willing governments as well as supranational human rights organizations (Pietikäinen and Kelly-Holmes 2011). Such a perspectivealthough generally rooted in its opposition to the dominant language ideologyoften merely transfers the dominant language ideology onto that of the minority language (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994).…”

Los precios de las esmeraldas colombianas: Formas parasitarias de habitar la formalización minera en Colombia

“…Y fueron también la preocupación de El parásito, el bellísimo texto de Serres, quien propone que las presencias parasitarias son relaciones que se insertan en otra relación, no para convertirse en un término integrado, sino para fundar algo distinto (Serres, [1980(Serres, [ ] 2015. Si pensamos los intercambios monetarios en estos términos, entendemos que la operación para hacer que algo se parezca a algo es, simultánea y necesariamente, la operación para desechar las diferencias que impedirían el cambio (Ferry, 2018;Hankins y Yeh, 2016). De esta manera vemos que la presencia parasitaria consiste justamente en habitar ese desecho que constituye cualquier equivalencia, cualquier intercambio, aunque sea en la trastienda.…”

“…44Entiendo el valor como las prácticas para definir diferencias y semejanzas entre entidades (incluidas las prácticas mismas de definición) (Ferry, 2018) y la consecuente posibilidad e imposibilidad de equivalencias y movimientos (Hankins y Yeh, 2016). Cualquier equivalencia crea y emerge de sus restos, es decir, de todas las exclusiones que la hacen posible.…”

The archaeology of decay: Ruinous knowledge and the violence of urban planning

“…Despite its technical aura and layering with statistics, the estratificación system is far from a neutral descriptor. Instead, and as anthropological work on the politics of measurement and commensuration shows, estratos are generative of social worlds and relations of power (Hankins and Yeh, 2016). They not only presuppose tacit norms and knowledges, what Kockelman (2016, 398) calls “comparative grounds,” but are also constitutive of semiotic, material, and experiential realities.…”