Table of Contents



Introduction: Intensity
Too Close for Comfort
Language, Culture, Environment
Grading, Gradients, Degradation, Grace
The Genealogy of Intensity
Temporality, Modality, Replenishment
From Small Potatoes to Unlivable Extremes
Affect and Intensity, Matter and Energy


1) Comparative Grounds
A Small-Scale Landslide
Introduction to Comparative Judgments
The Comparative Construction in Q'eqchi'
The Context-Sensitivity of Comparative Grounds
Risk Assessment in Comparative Contexts
The Comparative Grounds of Sartorial Status and Shame
Ontology, Identity, and Performativity


2) Causal Grounds
Landslides and Loss
Introduction to Gradients
Gradients as Grounds for Interpretation
Forcefields and Flows
Parasitic Forces
Communicating Causality
Action and Inference, Affect and Intuition
Reframing Causality


3) Grounding Experience
Channeling Intensity
The Grounds of Experience
Semiotic Practices as Continuous Processes
The Secret Heliotropism of Flowers
Grounding Materiality
Substance and Affordance Reframed
Machetes, Corncobs, and Mountains
The Grabbiness and Slipperiness of Experience


4) Grounding the Anthropocene
Cosmologies
Grace
You're Getting Warmer
Thermodynamic Anthropology
Carnot Knowledge (and Power)
The Heat Engine as Time Machine


5) Intensifiers
Intimacy and Intensity
The Many Functions of Mas
The Larger System
Comparison Classes
Scaling Intensity
The History of Jwal
A Natural History of Assholery


6) The History of Mas
Más about Mas
Loans and Calques
Usage in the Twentieth Century
Comparative Strategies
Usage in the Late Nineteenth Century
The Genealogy of Mas
The Apperception of Mas
Linguistic Purism and the Purging of Mas


7) The Comparative Complex
Complexes, Constructions, Strategies
The Modern Construction Revisited
The 'Pass-Before' Construction
The Art of the Q'eqchi' Language
The 'Pass-Over' Construction
Superlative and Equality Constructions
The 'Multiples-of' Construction
The Aggregation (and Degredation) of Grounds


8) Sentences and their Shadows
The Many Functions of 'More'
Presupposed and Asserted Contents
Moreness, Existence, Negation
More and Else
Quantity More Constructions
Temporal Comparatives
Only Constructions
Also Constructions
Two, Too, and Taboo


9) Temporality and Replacement
Being and Time
Relations, References, Replacement
Neither Commodity Nor Singularity
Repetition and Interruption
Reversibility and Irreversiblity
Reckoning and Regimentation
Roots and Fruits
Ontology and Cosmology
Scaling Genealogy


10) Temporal Thresholds
Phase Transitions in Truth Conditions
Dual Groups and Duplex Categories
Anyway, Unless, and Until
From No Longer to Not Again
From Repetition to Restitution
The Doubling of Dual Operators
From Ethnography to Inquisition


11) Modality and Worlding
The Ties that Bind
Ability
Possibility
Negated Possibility
Necessity and Obligation
Telic Modality
Economy and Agency
Grounding Worlds that Could be Otherwise


12) Modal Thresholds
Not Having Enough
To Suffice or Satisfy
Insufficient and Incomplete
Really and Truly
Pure and Authentic
Not Yet and No Longer Enoug
Avoiding Responsibilities
Lacking Capacities
Excess and Affect


Conclusion: The Ecological Self
Enough Already
Modal Intensifiers
Temporal Operators
The Chronotopology of Intensity
Grounding the Anthropocene (Continued)



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