What is "Ma-ai"?: A Second-Person Theory of Embodiment

2020/05/29

The term "ma-ai" is quite vague. While the body certainly feels it, it is a highly tacit phenomenon that cannot be fully expressed in a single word. Perhaps for this reason, there has been little research exploring "ma-ai" in the past. This is a brand-new challenge for cognitive scientists who have been exploring bodily knowledge and the cognition of communication.

"Ma" means space or distance. However, as can be seen in interpersonal sports (e.g., kendo), "ma-ai" is not a concept that can be captured solely by the physical distance or physical time lag between bamboo swords or between bodies. "One's own ma-ai" is a physical and mental state in which the opponent is frozen, allowing only oneself to launch an attack. The presence of "ai" (matching/joining) makes this concept even more complex.

It is not a concept limited to competitive scenes. As an example of cooperative ma-ai, consider a situation where you are standing and talking with someone. While empathizing with the other person's thoughts and feelings from a second-person perspective, we casually make temporal adjustments—such as intentionally overlapping speech or pausing—and spatial adjustments, such as positioning and the distance or orientation of the body. The totality of these elements, including tone of voice, intensity of speech, facial expressions, gaze, and gestures, constitutes cooperative ma-ai.

This book suggests that ma-ai is ubiquitous in all aspects of life. It takes up baseball, soccer, and jiu-jitsu as examples of interpersonal sports, and everyday casual conversation and the interaction between dentist and patient in dental clinics as examples of daily life. The rapport that develops between field researchers and the target community (in this book, the members of a local festival's organizing body and the researcher) is also an interesting case study.

"Ma-ai" is not limited to interpersonal situations. The book also introduces the hypothesis that comfort in architectural spaces may be a form of "ma-ai" where people and space (existing objects and their arrangement) meet.

All of these inquiries are based on moving from the laboratory into the field to focus on phenomena occurring on-site, observing and describing the interactions occurring between one's own body, others, and objects from a first-person perspective. Research on ma-ai cannot be done without this. It is also a book that asks what academia should be like for the exploration of tacit knowledge.

What is "Ma-ai"?: A Second-Person Theory of Embodiment

Masaki Suwa

Shunjusha

272 pages, 2,200 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.