There is a type of conversation about the environment that has become increasingly common, marked by the preamble, ‘When I was young, it was cold enough to snow every winter’. Or, ‘This is the hottest summer on record!’. While this conversation might begin any number of ways, each is sparked by a speaker's observation of a palpably dramatic shift in climate.
Paul Kockelman reckons with the pragmatics of this conversation type in The anthropology of intensity, examining how language marks and measures intensity—defined as ‘significant degrees of salient dimensions in shared worlds’ (1)—in the Anthropocene era, ‘a particularly tense and timely coupling of temporality and intensity’ (362). Most of the data informing this investigation was collected over the course of twenty years of extended fieldwork among Q'eqchi’ speakers in Guatemala; with close and erudite analyses of the change in intensification forms, the book will surely be of interest to scholars of Q'eqchi’.
Kockelman organizes his examination of intensity in three parts: the ‘grounds’ by which events are understood and interpreted through cause and comparison; the ‘tensors’, or relative values, by which intensities are registered; and the ‘thresholds’ at which a temporal condition shifts. His frameworks can be used to analyze the utterance ‘When I was young, it was cold enough to snow every winter’. This statement contains a figure of comparison (when the speaker was young), a ground of comparison (today), a dimension of comparison (temperature), and a magnitude of comparison (enough); these comparisons can be identified in Q'eqchi’ statements as well as English (33). The condition described is made relative to the current moment by the intensifier ‘enough’, as temperatures were lower when the speaker was young. A temporal threshold is implied, wherein at some point in the years between the speaker's youth and the present era, it was no longer cold enough to snow (288). Kockelman proposes that this language of intensity functions as a ‘semiotic commons’ that speakers utilize to evaluate situations, experience events affectively, nurture social relations, and ‘configure and inhabit possible worlds’ (4).
Where this study of intensity leaves readers interested in broader topics of culture and the environment, however, is somewhat less clear. This book is not an account of Q'eqchi’ speakers per se (instead, see Kockelman's earlier work), yet neither is it an account of how intensity in language is implicated in the encounter with climate change, extinction, or other pressing environmental issues. Although the Anthropocene occupies a point of prominence in the book, there is little engagement with the profusion of literature emerging from its theorization and debate, or elaboration of other noted concepts such as affect and identity; indeed, outside the footnotes, readers are hard pressed to find references dated within the past decade. Despite this somewhat missed opportunity to build on contemporary discussions, The anthropology of intensity nonetheless offers a thorough framework for understanding how speakers make sense of shifting degrees of change in a starkly mutable world.
