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Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice
Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 63e71
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Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice William F. Hanks a, Sachiko Ide b, Yasuhiro Katagiri c, Scott Saft d, Yoko Fujii b, Kishiko Ueno e, * a
Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley, 232 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA Japan Women's University, 2-8-1, Mejirodai, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112-8681, Japan c Future University Hakodate, 116-2 Kamedanakano-cho, Hakodate, Hokkaido, 041-8655, Japan d wili St., Hilo, HI 96720-4091, USA lani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 200 W. Ka Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻeliko e Tokyo City University, 8-9-18 Todoroki, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 158-8586, Japan b
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 3 May 2019
This paper proposes an innovative approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the notion of individual as starting point in order to understand interactive context as a single integrated whole. This break is made by introducing the Japanese philosophical concept of ba and basho. The conceptualization of basho was initiated by Nishida Kitaro and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba principle, a theory of the emergence of information in dynamical systems, has been theorized by Shimizu. A ba and basho approach is a way of rethinking context that lies at the heart of pragmatics. A ba and basho approach presupposes ‘primary ba,’ ‘secondary ba’ and ‘ba theory.’ The uniqueness of this approach is the level of ‘primary ba,’ which is basically an ontology of mutual dependence, impermanence and ultimately non-separation. Nishida referred to this level of ba as ‘Basho of Absolute Nothingness.’ By applying ba theory to language practices, we analyze and present new interpretations of interactive discourse. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Ba theory Basho Context Interaction Imputed intention Phenomenology
1. Introduction In response to the question posed to authors of the special issue on ‘Quo Vadis Pragmatics?’ this paper proposes a complementary approach to existing pragmatics theories by introducing the Japanese terms ba and basho ‘place, space, field’ as a concept in communicative interaction. This idea grew out of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project that was featured in three special issues of JoP in 2009 (vol. 41/1), 2012 (vol. 44/5) and 2014 (vol. 69). For the last fifteen years, the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project has been seeking a paradigm toward better understanding of non-western languages and their practices as a means of building on research traditions in pragmatics which tend to rely uncritically on the common sense of speakers of modern western languages. What we propose in this paper is an approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the individual or even the dyad in order to start from interactive context as a single, integrated whole. Our means of making this break is through consideration
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (W.F. Hanks), [email protected] (S. Ide), [email protected] (Y. Katagiri), [email protected] (S. Saft), yokofujii@ nifty.com (Y. Fujii), [email protected] (K. Ueno). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.03.013 0378-2166/© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/).
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of both the philosophical approach known as basho, which was developed by Nishida (2012)and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba principle, which has been developed by Shimizu. Shimizu (1995) brilliantly theorized a scientific theory of the emergence of information in dynamical systems based on basho. The philosopies of basho and the ba principle are well established and dynamic, with proponents in several fields (Berque (1997) in geography, Carter (2013) and Heisig (2001) in philosophy, and Itami (2005) in business administration). In this paper we argue for ba theory as a way of rethinking the idea of “context” which lies at the heart of contemporary pragmatics and present an innovating approach as our response to ‘Quo Vadis Pragmatics?’ The interest of ba and basho for pragmatics is that it is, in effect, a theory of contextual interdependence, alternative to our more familiar ones, and which speaks directly to what we commonly call ‘situatedness, indexicality, co-presence, and context.’ Moreover, the Kyoto School approach to basho, in fact, developed out of intensive dialogue with German phenomenology and, to a lesser extent, American Pragmatism.1 Important parts of linguistic anthropology arose in dialogue with the same philosophies, which further familiarizes ba and basho for a western reader. But there is another side to ba and basho, which has nothing to do with those western philosophies, but instead defines itself in a consciously Asian register, mostly Zen Buddhism and before it Chinese Buddhism. For some thinkers, Shinto is also a source. In addition to these scholarly sources of ba and basho as a concept, it should also be pointed out that in ordinary Japanese, there is a considerable vocabulary of expressions and usages based on the morpheme ba, of which basho is one example. In ordinary Japanese, ba is a semantically polyvalent noun. It figures in a large number of expressions, in which there are subtle shifts in its semantic focus. For heuristic purposes, we describe the semantic range of ordinary ba in terms of six broad (and overlapping) ideas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
A place for some activity A scene (of a crime; in film or theatre) An interaction (between two or more persons) An occasion (as to schedule a meeting or get-together in the future) An ambiance (the feeling you have in a situation, relaxed, good, out of place, etc.) Situational appropriateness (what is called for, what is out of bounds, propriety)
There is little in this list that is exotic for a speaker of English. The six main usages cited all revolve around place, interactional frames and the behavior that emerges in them. Unlike English ‘place and space,’ neither ba nor basho2 designates empty space denuded of qualities, but rather in almost every usage, it is a space for some action in which humans engage. Affective atmosphere, goodness of fit, and discernment of what is called for are aspects of ba and all presuppose human experience not only of the spatial field, but of the interactional field as well. This implies participation frameworks, norms governing behavior, one's own sense of belonging, and the singularity of any particular interaction. These aspects of ba push the concept in the direction of a deictic field – not just any setting, but a setting defined relative to co-participating people, implying perceptual fields, corporeality and the “intuitive” sense of what is called for. The intuitive sense of what is called for is known as wakimae (Ide, 1989). In wakimae, usage of language does not derive from the individual, but primarily emerges from the context as a whole. Encountering the concept of ba provides a gateway for answering the longstanding question of how wakimae works. Our argument is that ba has unique contributions to make to contemporary theory, and also to contemporary field methods in anthropology. 2. Ba: from ontology to theory We distinguish three broad spheres (or levels) of ba: ‘primary ba,’ ‘secondary ba’ and ‘ba theory.’3 Primary ba is the least familiar from a Euro-American perspective, so we start there. At this level, ba is basically an ontology of mutual dependence, impermanence and ultimately non-separation. Japanese scholars describe it in terms of Buddhist (especially Zen) and sometimes Shinto ideas regarding the non-separation of humans from nature. Indeed, the search is for a level of nonseparation that is ontologically prior to the subject-object distinction. Nishida, founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, called this level ‘Basho of Absolute Nothingness,’ by which he meant an original space in which no things exist because no distinctions are made, and in which, therefore, there are no discrete objects, nor, for the same reason, subjects. Primary ba then implies a philosophical, religious and very rigorous dissolving of the categories that populate ordinary practical reasoning.
1 Here we would mention the writings of William James, cited by Nishida, and particularly James's (1912: 21e47) piece entitled “A world of pure experience” and “The relations between the knower and the known” in James (2002 [1909]: 102e120). 2 Both ba and basho are Japanese words meaning ‘place, space, field’ commonly used in Japanese everyday lives. Basho is a compound word made up of two morphemes of ba and sho. Both morphemes would normally be translated as ‘place.’ The morpheme sho is used only in combination with other morphemes as follows: ba-sho ‘ba-place,’ juu-sho ‘live-place’ (a place where one lives ¼ address), and nan-sho ‘hard-place’ (a place hard to pass). This paper uses the terms ba and basho as pragmatic meta-language designating the holistic field of interaction without assuming either the ‘distantiated subject’ or the egocentric ‘context’ of classical linguistic approaches. Ba is a sort of transcendent representation of basho. 3 This three-way division is proposed and spelled out in more detail in Hanks (2016, 2017).
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Take for example the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu,4 the masters of Japanese swordsmanship of the ruling warrior clan during the Edo period. Given that there is not sufficient time in situations of combat to read the opponents’ minds, infer their intentions, predict their next moves, and then plan an adequate next move, the swordsmen sought to empty their selves in order to become one with others so they would be ready to produce necessary responses (Nagata, 2002). Success in combat, thus, depended on dissolving the self-other distinction and achieving a state of non-separation through emptiness. To the swordsmen, in other words, it was absolutely crucial to remain in a primary ba, that is, basho of absolute nothingness (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. The demonstration of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu martial arts by Yagyu Nobuharu Taira Toshimichi (the 21st Headmaster, Right) and Yagyu Koichi Taira Toshinobu (the 22nd Headmaster, Left) (Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Heihou official site).
Secondary ba, by contrast, is much closer to English ʻcontext’ or ‘situation.’ It is the interactional space in which a process unfolds. For example, face to face conversation always takes place in a secondary ba, which consists of the embedding context/setting/occasion in which the interaction transpires. This embedding includes a vast amount of categorial information about who and what are involved in the interaction, as well as where, when, and why the interaction takes place. Whereas primary ba is unarticulated, secondary ba is a space of articulation, categorization and distinction. Language and social practice produce distinctions, divisions, hierarchies and objects of many kinds (including discrete thoughts). In ordinary Japanese usage, a ba is as banal as the space between the boat and the dock, or a place to put your feet. It is as familiar as the connection one feels in a good conversation, or in any situation where one feels at ease. This kind of ba can be broken up by inappropriate behavior or by leave-taking, whereas there is no leaving primary ba.5 Language is both distorting of primary ba and radically powerful in converting primary ba into a universe of inter-related distinctions. One of these socially created distinctions is the one between self and other. Ba theory is different from both of the former two. It consists of a set of theoretical concepts, a way of modeling something like contextual embedding, and a way of reasoning about contexts and information. It is a metalanguage in the sense that it refers to (objectifies and analyzes) the relations between primary and secondary levels.
3. Ba principle as set forth by Hiroshi Shimizu Shimizu (1995) proposed a new definition of basho. As we understand it, sho means ‘place’ and basho means a place in which a relational process emerges, viewed from inside. Shimizu is clear that basho is an alternative to the distantiated subject sometimes attributed to western thought (especially Cartesian), and which has played a central role in western language theory. For ba theory, the starting point is precisely not distantiated, but interior to the world you hope to grasp. And interiority becomes radical if you rephrase it as, ‘you are in a relation of non-separation from the context you wish to describe.’ If used in the course of linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, ba theory calls for deep engagement with the ethnographic setting, and the discipline to view it not from outside, but from within.6 Now, imagine a painter before a blank canvas in a room. His or her task is to depict the room as accurately as possible in its present state. Think photorealism. Of course, the painter and the canvas are part of the room (s)he is portraying with brush strokes, and this interiority poses a challenge (s)he will fail to solve. Starting to paint on a blank canvas, the painter adds details, but because the canvas is part of the room, the room is changing as (s)he adds details to the canvas. The painting of the canvas must include a painting of the canvas, but (s)he will
4
For more information, see http://www.yagyu-shinkage-ryu.jp/wordpress/?page_id¼931&lang¼en (accessed March 1, 2019). Understood as what Nishida and Nishitani called “Basho of Absolute Nothingness,” primary ba is the unarticulated whole of Reality, from which there is no outside. A speaker in the secondary ba of face-to-face interaction can readily leave, simply by walking away. But wherever he or she goes after leaving, it will be still subsumed by the primary ba of unarticulated Reality. 6 A fieldworker has to become a constituent of basho. This is more radical than the standard methods of participant observation and what used to be called “emic” analysis in an earlier generation of anthropology. Note the following: ‘Given the “field” basis of ba and basho thought, interiority is a concept far more generative than our ideas of being merely “in context”’ (in Section 7, Conclusion). 5
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always be a step behind the actual state of the room, which emerges from changes on the canvas. This is the problem of reflexivity. The painter is in a basho. For Shimizu, ‘the most crucial problem is how to avoid the paradox of self-reference’ (1995:70). At this point, Shimizu distinguishes between two kinds of representation of basho. One is egocentric, provides a microscopic sketch of basho according to a logic that presumes the division between subject and object (Shimizu, 1995:71). This corresponds to what we call second order ba, in which separation and articulation emerge. The other is basho centric. It provides a holistic transcendental sketch of basho in which subject-object are non-separable. This non-separability is rooted in primary ba, which relates to secondary ba as the subsuming room relates to the emergent painting produced in it. The self (the reflexive subject) is the “convergence point” at which these two kinds of representation articulate. We thus have a model with two levels that are distinct but intersect, in a real-time process that produces the self as an emergent process of articulation. A long tradition of research in linguistics assumes the egocentric logic of second order ba. The speaker, like the painter, is a self-same agent distinct from the portrait (s)he produces, and distinct from the broader context in which (s)he finds himself. By contrast, in a holistic representation of basho, the utterance, like the painting, is inseparable from the context in which it is produced, and it unavoidably alters that context, just as the painting alters the room (and for the identical reason). The holistic perspective starts from the subsuming context in which the actors, their actions and the objects they relate to, are all non-separated – so deep is their mutual interdependence. From this level, what the utterance accomplishes is not the portrayal of pre-existing individuated objects, but the creation of the objects and of the subject who denotes them, simultaneously and interdependently. From this interaction of levels, the speaker as self emerges in real time. Shimizu then sketches the ‘improvisational drama model’ of ba. Basho is no longer only the interaction of the self with what is represented, but the self with others in the emerging social field of which the self is a part. Consider the improvisational troupe, who share a story line, but who individually start from indeterminate positions. It is not possible to predict what they will do or which aspects of the story line they will enact. Moreover, the actors are performing in front of, and addressing, an audience. Their enacted representation must respond to that audience's representation. We are now in a complex interactive space. The actors respond to what they assume to be the representations of the audience, as well as to the gestures and expressions of their fellow-actors. In the terms of western theory, we are in the zone of Gricean implicatures and Shelling games (where I try to guess your representation of the matter at hand, and of me). The improvisational actors enact intentions in response to imputed intentions. Out of this complex mirroring, their actions emerge. In ba language, it is out of the holistic basho that the separated basho emerges, and by the ba of the whole that the ba of separation is subsumed and constrained. The improvisational drama model of ba also illustrates that interactions are self-organizing, but individuals are not selforganizing. What does this mean? It means that from the ongoing mutual readjustment of actors, actions and objects to one another, there emerges an order of ba that subsumes the individuals whose distinctness is not the precondition, but the product of interaction. 4. Phenomenology and ba theory There is a deep relation between ba theory and phenomenology. All of the Kyoto School philosophers engaged German thought, and most corresponded with philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, or actually studied with them in Germany.7 The phenomenological focus on the first person point of view is contrary to both primary ba and ba theory, because it starts from the premise that the subject is given, whereas primary ba is devoid of individuation, and ba theory generates the subject from the joining of primary and secondary ba.8 Starting from the distinctness of the subject as an ‘I,’ phenomenology must explain how this individuated ‘I’ is embedded in interactive relations. It does so by layering upon the already separated subject a series of articulations, summarized by the label “intersubjectivity” – a relation that shares key properties with ba and basho. 1. Husserlian empathy, the ability to take the perspective of another. With Schutz (1967), this will become the reciprocity of perspectives, which says that ‘If I put myself in your shoes, the world would look to me as it looks to you.’ 2. The mutuality of what you and I both know and know what we know in common. Part of this is anonymous common sense (typification), and part of it is shared biography. 3. Corporeally mediated co-presence, that is, synchronous reciprocal perceptual access binding interactants to one another, the simultaneity of the expression and the reception, and the fact that the parties to conversation co-occupy a single interactive space-time. 4. What Schutz called the dovetailing of motives, whereby your “in order to” motive (what you are trying to accomplish in speaking) becomes my “because motive” (what I respond to). This dovetailing is again less radical than non-separation, but
7
For excellent synthesis of the Kyoto school and its relation to European philosophy, see Heisig (2001) and Carter (2013). This statement abbreviates what is in fact a varied set of stances of phenomenologists regarding the status of the subject as either basic or derived. Nonetheless, the shared focus on experience and the first person point of view are consistent with the centrality of the subject, and basically different from ba theory. For a useful overview of phenomenology, see Smith (2018). 8
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it further links the parties at the level of intentionality and theory of mind. My intention in responding to you includes my representation of your intention. 5. Cooperation whereby participants engage in the essentially cooperative enterprise of interacting with one another. Note that even conflict can be built on assumption that combatants are cooperating in conflict - they are engaged. This appeal to cooperation, most prominent in the work of Paul Grice, plays a role similar to that of the mutually known story line upon which Shimizu's dramatists improvise. 6. Co-occupancy of the diachronic stream of the real-time present: As Schutz puts it, interactants ‘grow old together.’ 7. Transposability, that is, the capacity to take perspectives other than one's own, as we routinely do in quoted speech, narrative and empathic identification with another being. Taken together, these seven dimensions embed the subject in an intersubjective formation. It is not exactly basho of absolute nothingness, but it is heading in the right direction. So what is the takeaway? Phenomenology has to explain the possibility of non-separation, and ba theory needs to explain the dynamics and telos of separation through articulation. 5. Deixis through the mirror of ba theory We want now to briefly map the deictic field of utterance into the improvisational model of ba. The speaker, like Shimizu's paradoxical painter, is inseparable from the deictic field in which (s)he speaks. In verbal interaction, no clear boundary can be drawn between the participants and the context because the context is the emergent condition and product of their relation. Thus, we start from an a priori relation of interiority and non-separation between the participants and the deictic field. The processes of separation and union are the product of holistic basho interacting with egocentric basho. Now, like the paradoxical painter, the speaker who utters a deictic in reference to her/himself, to a co-present other, or to an object thereby alters the indexical ground from which (s)he speaks. This is the effect of the unavoidable reflexivity of all deictic practice. The deictic field is not merely a physical space, but an emergent relation in which each verbal brush stroke, each improvisation, adjusts to and alters the context it is presumed to represent. Conceptualized through the lens of basho, the deictic field has five key properties: 1. Interiority: like the painter before the canvas in the room (s)he is portraying; the speaker is in the deictic field. 2. Non-separation, realized in deep mutual interdependence of all aspects of the deictic field. The indexical ground joins subject-object, is unarticulated and ultimately unarticulable. 3. Reflexivity: like the painter painting the room he is in, the speaker denoting objects is in the field he is speaking in, thereby altering the basho in which it occurs. 4. Impermanence and ongoing self-organization of the interactive field of deixis. 5. Both basho and the deictic field are scalable, from ultimate ontology to the basho of a social interaction. This is a very important principle, because neither basho nor the deictic field is a thing with a fixed degree of inclusiveness. Both are relational spaces of variable extent. In this sense, basho is very much like a “field” of interaction. For the subject, their own body is the basho in which ‘prise de conscience’ emerges. When applying this concept to linguistic practice, we speak of the indexical ground as a primary ba – but this does not imply that we necessarily anchor our linguistic actions in a metaphysical, infinite order of existence. What counts as primary ba for an interaction is of highly variable scale and quality. Between a Roshi and a Zen monk, it may well be the ultimate primary ba that serves as anchor, that of which one cannot speak without dissolving its unity and distorting its ultimate impermanence. Similarly, the non-separation of primary ba may be absolute or relative (a matter of degree). Interdependence contributes to relative non-separation. 6. Bringing ba theory to language practice Discussion of deixis puts us in the realm of social interaction and language usage. As noted previously, interaction occurs in secondary ba, but it does not necesarily disrupt the non-separation of primary ba. The Yagyu Shinkage Ryu example, in contrast, suggests that the less the shared content, the better the interaction. This is because one opponent, by emptying himself of content in order to internalize the perspective of the other, can attain a state of absolute nothingness, which would result in enhanced understanding and thus better interaction with the other opponent. Likewise, participants who empty themselves of content and attain the level of primary ba may have better interaction.
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Still, as also noted above, the relation of primary ba to an interaction is not fixed and may vary significantly. In this section, we present two excerpts of data to discuss the emergence of interaction from within primary ba. The first excerpt comes from a set of 26 conversations in Japanese from the Mister O Corpus, a larger set of data gathered in order to examine language patterns across languages.9 This particular set consists of dyadic conversations between female students who are close friends. The dyads were told to focus their conversations on the question, “What were you most surprised at?” Each conversation lasted for about 5 min. The excerpt presented below comes at a point in the conversation just after the participant “T” (Teller) has described her surprise at encountering a dying crow on the street. She has done this mostly in “monologue” form as the other participant, “R,” (Recipient) listened. Line 1 seemingly serves as a conclusion as T uses the deictic sore (‘that’) with the subject marker ga to “formulate” (Heritage and Watson, 1979) “that” as fitting the topic of “what surprised me recently.” Excerpt 1: Mister O Corpus as presented in Ueno (2017) 1
T: sore ga saikin ichiban bikkuri shita koto “That’s what surprised (me) the most recently.” 2 R: {laugh} saikin bi karasu ka {laugh} “(What) surprised (you) recentlyda crow, huh?” 3 T: karasu datte shinisoo da[kara agaiteru n da mon “A crow, (I)’m telling (you): (it) was about to die, fighting for its life!” 4 R: [shinisoo na no hajimete mi[kiita “(This) is the first time (I) ever sawdheard about something about to die.” 5 T: [un, sugoi ne, nan daro, karasu gurai okkii to, kekko “Yeah, amazing isn’t it? How should I put this: with something as big as a crow, (it’s) quite…” 6 R: bibiru yo[ne “Scary, isn’t it?” 7 T: [nan daro, un, ningen poi to wa iwanai kedo, doobutsu tte kanji datta “How should I put this: yeah, (I) won’t say (it was) like a human being, but (one) felt (it was) a living animal.” 8 R: {laugh} shikamo kuroi shi ne¼ {laugh} “and also (it was) black, so…” 9 T: ¼kuroi shi, sugoi, demo ne, kawaisoo datta, yappa, shi[nisoo da to, karasu dakedo “(It was) black, super (black), but anyway, (it) was pitiful, with (it) about to died(I) mean, (it) was a crow, but…” 10 R: [aa, nn, n, karasu dakedo “Ah, hmm, (it) was a crow, but...” 11 T: {laugh} kawaisoo da {laugh}“(It) was pitiful!” 12 R: soo datta n da “Was (it) now.”
With the statement karasu datte (‘A crow, (I)’m telling (you)’), in line 3 T seems to emphasize that the information has come from her as the storyteller. Yet, much like the improvisational model of ba, in which the actors perform and react to a fellow actor, the individual self of the storyteller cannot exist separately. Instead, the self only emerges because the fellow actor is there; it only exists as it reads and acts upon the imputed intentions of the fellow actors. It is, as stated earlier in the discussion of the improvisational model, from the holistic basho, represented here by the shared activity of story-telling, that the separated basho emerges. Moreover, in the same way that the improvisational troupe constantly reorders their basho with each uttered line, so do the participants in the story-telling continue to alter the basho to which they are interior. Every utterance and action they -vis one another. Thus, we can see that as T is make changes not just the emerging basho but also their own positions vis-a describing in line 3 the crow's struggle for life, R no longer remains a silent listener as she overlaps in line 4 with an utterance that supports the idea that it was a surprising occurrence. R's overlap in 4, in fact, leads to another overlapped utterance from T in line 5 in which she adds more support for this being a surprising story. She highlights the size of the crow, and just as she ends with the word kekkoo (‘(it's) quite’), R enters again in line 6 to complete her utterance with bibiru (‘scary’). Together then, the two participants have coordinated their speech to enhance the sense of the story from a bikkuri shita koto (‘surprising thing’) to bibiru (‘scary’). This upgrade has emerged not from any one individual but from the holistic basho that has now been reordered according to the non-separated participants realized by mutual interdependence. Indeed, the data indicate that this non-separation of the participants extends from line 7 to the end of the excerpt in line 12 as T and R build on each other's comments through actions such as repetitions, laughter, other-utterance completions to construct the crow as kawaisoo (‘pitiful’) in lines 11 and 12. priori non-separation, shared interiority and reflexivity of interactants This example and the next one illustrate how the a in a primary ba provide resources for mutual engagement. Engagements like the ones shown here unfold in a secondary ba of
9 The Mister O Corpus is a video corpus collected for the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project. The purpose of the corpus is to illuminate cultural differences revealed in interactive discourse. Interactive discourse consists of task discourse, narrative and conversation in six languages and cultures: Japanese, American English, Korean, Libyan Arabic, Thai and Mandarin Chinese. The project was supported by the grant of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science during the years from 2003 to 2013 (Grant numbers: 15320054, 18320069, 20320064 and 23320090).
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linguistic and gestural articulation, thus binding the interactants even as their respective utterances distinguish and hence separate them. It is at this secondary level that the analytic tools provided by linguistics, conversation analysis, multimodal gestural analysis and contemporary pragmatics in its many guises become valuable. When interactants finish each others' utterances, display precision timing in response position, manage their phatic contact with laughter and non-lexical vocalization, and inferentially expand on one another's utterances, they rely not merely on “common knowledge” or reciprocal perception, but more holistically, on being in the same primary, largely presupposed basho. What is usually understood as analysis, as in conversation analysis, is strictly about secondary ba, whereas ba theory starts from the primary level as ontologically and methodologically prior. The second example demonstrates the application of ba theory to discourse in English and is taken from data borrowed from Goodwin (2004) that involves a participant with aphasia. Saft (2014) has previously used this data to describe how the multiple participants merge themselves together in their basho in order to produce a single story, which cannot be attributed to an individual. Here, we examine the data further to elucidate how the self emerges from the non-separation of holistic basho. It should be noted that Chil, the aphasic participant, is able to utter only three recognizable words, “yes,” “no,” and “and.” The excerpt is from a story initiated by Chil about an earthquake (Goodwin, 2004). Excerpt (2): From Goodwin (2004; reproduced in Saft, 2014) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Helen: Chil: Scott: Linda: Chil: Helen: Linda: Chil:
Scott was sleeping (0.2) yes uh-ha what happ[ened [really (0.5) yes en the picture over the be- uh the crib fell [on [oh my: [goodness [no
This story is attributed to Chil (as “Chil's story”) (Goodwin, 2004), but the unfolding story depends equally on the merging of the four participants within the same basho. Helen's first contribution in line 1 is met, after a short pause, with a “yes” from Chil, which in turn leads to an apparent question from Scott in line 5 “what happened?” that is overlapped by Linda's “really” in line 6. After a short pause in line 7, Chil once again moves the story along with a “yes” in line 8, thus prompting Helen to add more information in line 9 that is followed by another overlapped response from Linda in lines 10e11. Chil then reacts to this exchange with his own overlapped utterance, “no,” in line 12. In this way, each individual utterance is crucially important to the emerging story, which is produced incrementally based on the mutual attentiveness and interdependence of the four participants. The participants in this excerpt are thus akin to the painter who starts his or her painting merged together in a room with a blank canvas. Just as the painter begins to alter the canvas by adding content, so do the participants enter secondary ba by undertaking their story, with each individual utterance, like the painter's brush strokes, simultaneously emerging from the holistic basho and changing the ever developing basho. The individual responses derive from the complex readjustments that the participants make as they monitor one another. In other words, the individual responses are made possible by the interdependence and non-separation of the participants. The responses represent the separated egocentric basho in action as it develops from within the holistic basho. There is no separate basho without the holistic basho. The self is subsumed by the holistic order of basho that itself enables the emergence of the self. Through the merged interdependence of the four participants, Chil, together with the others, is constructed as an individual who is a competent participant to the story-telling activity. Note, however, that competence is not necessarily related to the amount of content. Here, it is not just Chil that produces minimal responses; the contributions of the other three participants in these twelve lines are also kept to a relative minimum, including several short pauses. As already suggested, ba and basho allow us to see that interaction need not result in an increase in shared content. Instead, for participants deeply embedded in holistic basho, the secondary ba of interaction may be constituted by minimal and even empty verbal content.
7. Conclusion We have attempted in this brief paper to sketch a conceptual analysis of ba and basho in Japanese thought, and to indicate through examples, how these ideas can be operationalized in cross-linguistic pragmatics. Our argument is not that ba and basho should REPLACE western language theory in any of the domains illustrated, including deixis, verbal interaction in Japanese, and the remarkable recruitment of background and extralinguistic knowledge in conversation between an adult English speaker, Chuck Goodwin, and his father Chil, a stroke patient with impaired ability to speak. Rather, we need both Euro-American theories, such as phenomenology, conversation analysis and the full array of linguistic pragmatics. At the level
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of actual interactions, we are examining processes of articulation, and these are the province of western language theory. But we also need non-western theories. Our argument is that by adopting this new way of analyzing speech context, aspects of human interaction that are taken for granted or left unexplored in our received theories, are suddenly thrust into focus. What we have labelled “interiority” is an unspoken given in Euro-American approaches to the deictic field, but ba theory links this to reflexivity in an entirely new way. Since we know many of the linguistic indexes of reflexivity, this linkage can be empirically researched. Moreover, being within the deictic field has been viewed as an occasionally relevant circumstance of individuation in western theories of definite referring, whereas in ba theory, individuation is merely one of many affordances of the more basic fact of interiority. Given the “field” basis of ba and basho thought, interiority is a concept far more generative than our ideas of being merely “inside” or “in a context.” Non-separation is a radical way of reformulating the sharing between participants, and the co-dependency between objects and participants in an interactive field (hence, intersubjectivity and interobjectivity). Notice, though, that if you START from self-other/subject-object separation, it is the possibility of partial union that must be explained, whereas if you START from non-separation, as we do with primary ba, it is articulation that must be explained. This is fraught with potential for language theory, because language is the most powerful instrument of individuation that humans possess, and now we have a new vision of this instrument. The handling of reflexivity is also more radical in ba theory, since every utterance alters the field in which it is produced, just as the paradoxical painter alters the room by altering the representation of it. The insistence of ba theory on impermanence calls our attention to the dynamic deictic field, and suddenly we no longer assume stability in order then to explain change as variance, but the inverse: we presume constant change, and stabilization of context becomes the focal issue to be explained. How, we might ask, does articulation contribute to (temporary) stabilization? We do not see this question as having arisen in the Euro-American literature, but it is immediate in ba theory. Finally, we come to the key fact that the ba and basho concept applies at indefinitely many scales, from the body as basho of the mind, to nature as basho of the human, to the infinity of time and space as the ultimate, impermanent, non-separated, encompassing basho of we, here, now. We know this fact of scalability about the social contexts of interaction, but we have yet to theorize it convincingly. Moreover, we tend to equate interaction with what happens in the narrow confines of the face-to-face, as if it should show up on a transcript of talk between finite individuals in an articulated second order ba. This is a basic category error that conversation analysis has deformed into an article of faith. From a ba perspective, the multiplicity of scale is like a penumbral embedding of the here-now in the multiply scalable space-time of reality. We think that in this series of reversals there lies an opportunity for empirically hard-nosed pragmatics: the more we attend to language ecology, crosscultural pragmatics, the ethnographic settings of different genres and registers, the more we should consider the move that is classic in anthropological ethnography, namely the move to describing the world in the terms of those we study, and not only in the terms of our received theories. This we think is a challenge worth taking up, and ba and basho point to a way worth following. Acknowledgments The international project on Emancipatory Pragmatics would not have been possible without dedicated support of various people and institutions. Among them, let us mention only those who contributed to this paper. First of all, we acknowledge Dr. Hiroshi Shimizu, whose initial presentations to our group were transformative. Additionally, Mr. Masayuki Otsuka engaged in dialogue to help William F. Hanks learn Japanese ba and basho in comparison with European philosophies. Mr. Benjamin W. Boas created an intensive fieldwork program for W.F.H. to experience ba culture. This included a meeting with Yokota Roshi and Ota Priest at Engakuji (the head temple of the Rinzai school of Zen), who offered W.F.H. the exceptional opportunity to be immersed in the ambiance of ba, and an introduction to the Aikido Yoshinkan head training dojo, where W.F.H. experienced Aikido martial arts. Mr. Yagyu Koichi, the head master of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu swordsmanship, not only lectured and demonstrated the ba spirit of swordsmanship, but also introduced Shinto principles at Ise Grand Shrine. The project has been supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2003 to 2018 (Grant numbers: 15320054, 18320069, 20320064, 23320090, 15H03208, and 17K02746). We also wish to thank anonymous reviewers and guest editors for their valuable comments. References nie du lieu (Logic of place and spirit of place). In: Berque, A., Nys, P. (Eds.), Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine Berque, Augustin, 1997. Logique du lieu et ge (Logic of Place and Human Work). Bruxelles, Ousia, pp. 189e212. Carter, Robert E., 2013. The Kyoto School: an Introduction. State University of New York Press, Albany. Goodwin, Charles, 2004. A competent speaker who can't speak: the social life of aphasia. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 14 (2), 151e170. Hanks, William F., 2016. Basho: a theory of communicative interaction. In: Paper Presented at the 4th International Conference on Linguistics of Ba, Tokyo. March 2016. ms. Hanks, William F., 2017. Utterance context through the lens of Basho. In: Paper Presented at Fyssen Foundation Colloquium, Paris. October 2017. ms. Heisig, James W., 2001. Philosophers of Nothingness. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Heritage, John, Watson, Rod, 1979. Formulations as conversational objects. In: Psathas, G. (Ed.), Everyday Language. Irvington Press, New York, pp. 123e162. Ide, Sachiko, 1989. Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8, 223e248. Itami, Hiroyuki, 2005. Ba no Ronri to Manejimento (Ba Theory and Management). Toyo Keizai Shinho Sha, Tokyo. James, William, 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Longmans, Green, and Company, London. James, William, 2002 [1909]. The Meaning of Truth. Dover Publications, New York.
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Nagata, Shinya, 2002. Itami kara no soushutsu: Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Ryuso no negai (Genaration from pain: the prayers of the founder of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu). Mind Body Sci. 13, 24e25. Nishida, Kitaro, 2012. Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitaro, Translated by John Krummel and Shigemori Nagatomo. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Saft, Scott, 2014. Rethinking Western individualism from the perspective of social interaction and from the concept of ba. J. Pragmat. 69, 108e120. Schutz, Alfred, 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press, New York. Shimizu, Hiroshi, 1995. “Ba-principle”: new logic for the real-time emergence of information. Holonics 5 (1), 67e79. Smith, David W., 2018. Phenomenology. In: Zalta, E.N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2018 ed. Retrieved March 1, 2019, from. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/ Ueno, Kishiko, 2017. Speaking as Parts of a Whole: Discourse Interpretation from Ba-Based Thinking. Unpublished Dissertation. Japan Women’s University. Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Heihou official site. Retrieved March 1, 2019. from. http://yagyu-shinkage-ryu.jp/yagyu_e.html. William F. Hanks is Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1983 and previously taught at the University of Chicago (1983e1996) and Northwestern University (1996e2000). He has been a visiting professor at several institutions abroad, including the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the University of Copenhagen. His specialty is Mayan language and culture, and he has published widely on routine language use, ritual practice, and shamanism, and the colonial history of Yucatan Mexico. Sachiko Ide is Professor Emerita at Japan Women's University, Tokyo. She was president of International Pragmatics Association (2006e2011). Her research field is pragmatics and sociolinguistics. She has been the co-director of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project since 2005. Her interest in exploring wakimae has led to ba theory. Her current research interest is how cultures reflected in language use can be illuminated in terms of ba theory. Yasuhiro Katagiri received his Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1981. He worked at NTT Basic Research Labs and ATR Research Labs. He was director of ATR Media Information Science Laboratories. He is currently president at Future University Hakodate. His research fields are humanecomputer interaction and pragmatics. His current research interest is on the analysis and computational modeling of human interaction practices. lani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where he Scott Saft is currently an Associate Professor in the Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻeliko serves as the Chair of the Linguistics Program. His research focuses on the intersection of language, culture, and social interaction, and he focuses primarily on Japanese, Hawaiian, and Hawaiʻi Creole. Yoko Fujii is a professor in the Department of English at Japan Women's University, Tokyo. She has been a member of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project since 2005 and authored an article about the ba frame of thinking for a Journal of Pragmatics Special Issue on Emancipatory Pragmatics (2012). Her research focuses on discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, with a current interest in cross-linguistic perspectives on how culturally-rooted practices are reflected in linguistic practices. Kishiko Ueno received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Japan Women's University in 2017. She is currently a professor in the Foreign Language Center at Tokyo City University. Her research fields are pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Her current interests include the relationship among language, thought and culture, and discourse interpretation using ba theory.
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Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Communicative interaction in terms of ba theory: Towards an innovative approach to language practice William F. Hanks a, Sachiko Ide b, Yasuhiro Katagiri c, Scott Saft d, Yoko Fujii b, Kishiko Ueno e, * a
Anthropology Department, University of California, Berkeley, 232 Kroeber Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-3710, USA Japan Women's University, 2-8-1, Mejirodai, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112-8681, Japan c Future University Hakodate, 116-2 Kamedanakano-cho, Hakodate, Hokkaido, 041-8655, Japan d wili St., Hilo, HI 96720-4091, USA lani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, 200 W. Ka Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻeliko e Tokyo City University, 8-9-18 Todoroki, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo, 158-8586, Japan b
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 3 May 2019
This paper proposes an innovative approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the notion of individual as starting point in order to understand interactive context as a single integrated whole. This break is made by introducing the Japanese philosophical concept of ba and basho. The conceptualization of basho was initiated by Nishida Kitaro and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba principle, a theory of the emergence of information in dynamical systems, has been theorized by Shimizu. A ba and basho approach is a way of rethinking context that lies at the heart of pragmatics. A ba and basho approach presupposes ‘primary ba,’ ‘secondary ba’ and ‘ba theory.’ The uniqueness of this approach is the level of ‘primary ba,’ which is basically an ontology of mutual dependence, impermanence and ultimately non-separation. Nishida referred to this level of ba as ‘Basho of Absolute Nothingness.’ By applying ba theory to language practices, we analyze and present new interpretations of interactive discourse. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Ba theory Basho Context Interaction Imputed intention Phenomenology
1. Introduction In response to the question posed to authors of the special issue on ‘Quo Vadis Pragmatics?’ this paper proposes a complementary approach to existing pragmatics theories by introducing the Japanese terms ba and basho ‘place, space, field’ as a concept in communicative interaction. This idea grew out of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project that was featured in three special issues of JoP in 2009 (vol. 41/1), 2012 (vol. 44/5) and 2014 (vol. 69). For the last fifteen years, the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project has been seeking a paradigm toward better understanding of non-western languages and their practices as a means of building on research traditions in pragmatics which tend to rely uncritically on the common sense of speakers of modern western languages. What we propose in this paper is an approach to pragmatics that breaks away from the individual or even the dyad in order to start from interactive context as a single, integrated whole. Our means of making this break is through consideration
* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (W.F. Hanks), [email protected] (S. Ide), [email protected] (Y. Katagiri), [email protected] (S. Saft), yokofujii@ nifty.com (Y. Fujii), [email protected] (K. Ueno). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.03.013 0378-2166/© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/).
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of both the philosophical approach known as basho, which was developed by Nishida (2012)and his fellow philosophers at the Kyoto School in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ba principle, which has been developed by Shimizu. Shimizu (1995) brilliantly theorized a scientific theory of the emergence of information in dynamical systems based on basho. The philosopies of basho and the ba principle are well established and dynamic, with proponents in several fields (Berque (1997) in geography, Carter (2013) and Heisig (2001) in philosophy, and Itami (2005) in business administration). In this paper we argue for ba theory as a way of rethinking the idea of “context” which lies at the heart of contemporary pragmatics and present an innovating approach as our response to ‘Quo Vadis Pragmatics?’ The interest of ba and basho for pragmatics is that it is, in effect, a theory of contextual interdependence, alternative to our more familiar ones, and which speaks directly to what we commonly call ‘situatedness, indexicality, co-presence, and context.’ Moreover, the Kyoto School approach to basho, in fact, developed out of intensive dialogue with German phenomenology and, to a lesser extent, American Pragmatism.1 Important parts of linguistic anthropology arose in dialogue with the same philosophies, which further familiarizes ba and basho for a western reader. But there is another side to ba and basho, which has nothing to do with those western philosophies, but instead defines itself in a consciously Asian register, mostly Zen Buddhism and before it Chinese Buddhism. For some thinkers, Shinto is also a source. In addition to these scholarly sources of ba and basho as a concept, it should also be pointed out that in ordinary Japanese, there is a considerable vocabulary of expressions and usages based on the morpheme ba, of which basho is one example. In ordinary Japanese, ba is a semantically polyvalent noun. It figures in a large number of expressions, in which there are subtle shifts in its semantic focus. For heuristic purposes, we describe the semantic range of ordinary ba in terms of six broad (and overlapping) ideas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
A place for some activity A scene (of a crime; in film or theatre) An interaction (between two or more persons) An occasion (as to schedule a meeting or get-together in the future) An ambiance (the feeling you have in a situation, relaxed, good, out of place, etc.) Situational appropriateness (what is called for, what is out of bounds, propriety)
There is little in this list that is exotic for a speaker of English. The six main usages cited all revolve around place, interactional frames and the behavior that emerges in them. Unlike English ‘place and space,’ neither ba nor basho2 designates empty space denuded of qualities, but rather in almost every usage, it is a space for some action in which humans engage. Affective atmosphere, goodness of fit, and discernment of what is called for are aspects of ba and all presuppose human experience not only of the spatial field, but of the interactional field as well. This implies participation frameworks, norms governing behavior, one's own sense of belonging, and the singularity of any particular interaction. These aspects of ba push the concept in the direction of a deictic field – not just any setting, but a setting defined relative to co-participating people, implying perceptual fields, corporeality and the “intuitive” sense of what is called for. The intuitive sense of what is called for is known as wakimae (Ide, 1989). In wakimae, usage of language does not derive from the individual, but primarily emerges from the context as a whole. Encountering the concept of ba provides a gateway for answering the longstanding question of how wakimae works. Our argument is that ba has unique contributions to make to contemporary theory, and also to contemporary field methods in anthropology. 2. Ba: from ontology to theory We distinguish three broad spheres (or levels) of ba: ‘primary ba,’ ‘secondary ba’ and ‘ba theory.’3 Primary ba is the least familiar from a Euro-American perspective, so we start there. At this level, ba is basically an ontology of mutual dependence, impermanence and ultimately non-separation. Japanese scholars describe it in terms of Buddhist (especially Zen) and sometimes Shinto ideas regarding the non-separation of humans from nature. Indeed, the search is for a level of nonseparation that is ontologically prior to the subject-object distinction. Nishida, founder of the Kyoto School of philosophy, called this level ‘Basho of Absolute Nothingness,’ by which he meant an original space in which no things exist because no distinctions are made, and in which, therefore, there are no discrete objects, nor, for the same reason, subjects. Primary ba then implies a philosophical, religious and very rigorous dissolving of the categories that populate ordinary practical reasoning.
1 Here we would mention the writings of William James, cited by Nishida, and particularly James's (1912: 21e47) piece entitled “A world of pure experience” and “The relations between the knower and the known” in James (2002 [1909]: 102e120). 2 Both ba and basho are Japanese words meaning ‘place, space, field’ commonly used in Japanese everyday lives. Basho is a compound word made up of two morphemes of ba and sho. Both morphemes would normally be translated as ‘place.’ The morpheme sho is used only in combination with other morphemes as follows: ba-sho ‘ba-place,’ juu-sho ‘live-place’ (a place where one lives ¼ address), and nan-sho ‘hard-place’ (a place hard to pass). This paper uses the terms ba and basho as pragmatic meta-language designating the holistic field of interaction without assuming either the ‘distantiated subject’ or the egocentric ‘context’ of classical linguistic approaches. Ba is a sort of transcendent representation of basho. 3 This three-way division is proposed and spelled out in more detail in Hanks (2016, 2017).
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Take for example the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu,4 the masters of Japanese swordsmanship of the ruling warrior clan during the Edo period. Given that there is not sufficient time in situations of combat to read the opponents’ minds, infer their intentions, predict their next moves, and then plan an adequate next move, the swordsmen sought to empty their selves in order to become one with others so they would be ready to produce necessary responses (Nagata, 2002). Success in combat, thus, depended on dissolving the self-other distinction and achieving a state of non-separation through emptiness. To the swordsmen, in other words, it was absolutely crucial to remain in a primary ba, that is, basho of absolute nothingness (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. The demonstration of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu martial arts by Yagyu Nobuharu Taira Toshimichi (the 21st Headmaster, Right) and Yagyu Koichi Taira Toshinobu (the 22nd Headmaster, Left) (Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Heihou official site).
Secondary ba, by contrast, is much closer to English ʻcontext’ or ‘situation.’ It is the interactional space in which a process unfolds. For example, face to face conversation always takes place in a secondary ba, which consists of the embedding context/setting/occasion in which the interaction transpires. This embedding includes a vast amount of categorial information about who and what are involved in the interaction, as well as where, when, and why the interaction takes place. Whereas primary ba is unarticulated, secondary ba is a space of articulation, categorization and distinction. Language and social practice produce distinctions, divisions, hierarchies and objects of many kinds (including discrete thoughts). In ordinary Japanese usage, a ba is as banal as the space between the boat and the dock, or a place to put your feet. It is as familiar as the connection one feels in a good conversation, or in any situation where one feels at ease. This kind of ba can be broken up by inappropriate behavior or by leave-taking, whereas there is no leaving primary ba.5 Language is both distorting of primary ba and radically powerful in converting primary ba into a universe of inter-related distinctions. One of these socially created distinctions is the one between self and other. Ba theory is different from both of the former two. It consists of a set of theoretical concepts, a way of modeling something like contextual embedding, and a way of reasoning about contexts and information. It is a metalanguage in the sense that it refers to (objectifies and analyzes) the relations between primary and secondary levels.
3. Ba principle as set forth by Hiroshi Shimizu Shimizu (1995) proposed a new definition of basho. As we understand it, sho means ‘place’ and basho means a place in which a relational process emerges, viewed from inside. Shimizu is clear that basho is an alternative to the distantiated subject sometimes attributed to western thought (especially Cartesian), and which has played a central role in western language theory. For ba theory, the starting point is precisely not distantiated, but interior to the world you hope to grasp. And interiority becomes radical if you rephrase it as, ‘you are in a relation of non-separation from the context you wish to describe.’ If used in the course of linguistic or anthropological fieldwork, ba theory calls for deep engagement with the ethnographic setting, and the discipline to view it not from outside, but from within.6 Now, imagine a painter before a blank canvas in a room. His or her task is to depict the room as accurately as possible in its present state. Think photorealism. Of course, the painter and the canvas are part of the room (s)he is portraying with brush strokes, and this interiority poses a challenge (s)he will fail to solve. Starting to paint on a blank canvas, the painter adds details, but because the canvas is part of the room, the room is changing as (s)he adds details to the canvas. The painting of the canvas must include a painting of the canvas, but (s)he will
4
For more information, see http://www.yagyu-shinkage-ryu.jp/wordpress/?page_id¼931&lang¼en (accessed March 1, 2019). Understood as what Nishida and Nishitani called “Basho of Absolute Nothingness,” primary ba is the unarticulated whole of Reality, from which there is no outside. A speaker in the secondary ba of face-to-face interaction can readily leave, simply by walking away. But wherever he or she goes after leaving, it will be still subsumed by the primary ba of unarticulated Reality. 6 A fieldworker has to become a constituent of basho. This is more radical than the standard methods of participant observation and what used to be called “emic” analysis in an earlier generation of anthropology. Note the following: ‘Given the “field” basis of ba and basho thought, interiority is a concept far more generative than our ideas of being merely “in context”’ (in Section 7, Conclusion). 5
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always be a step behind the actual state of the room, which emerges from changes on the canvas. This is the problem of reflexivity. The painter is in a basho. For Shimizu, ‘the most crucial problem is how to avoid the paradox of self-reference’ (1995:70). At this point, Shimizu distinguishes between two kinds of representation of basho. One is egocentric, provides a microscopic sketch of basho according to a logic that presumes the division between subject and object (Shimizu, 1995:71). This corresponds to what we call second order ba, in which separation and articulation emerge. The other is basho centric. It provides a holistic transcendental sketch of basho in which subject-object are non-separable. This non-separability is rooted in primary ba, which relates to secondary ba as the subsuming room relates to the emergent painting produced in it. The self (the reflexive subject) is the “convergence point” at which these two kinds of representation articulate. We thus have a model with two levels that are distinct but intersect, in a real-time process that produces the self as an emergent process of articulation. A long tradition of research in linguistics assumes the egocentric logic of second order ba. The speaker, like the painter, is a self-same agent distinct from the portrait (s)he produces, and distinct from the broader context in which (s)he finds himself. By contrast, in a holistic representation of basho, the utterance, like the painting, is inseparable from the context in which it is produced, and it unavoidably alters that context, just as the painting alters the room (and for the identical reason). The holistic perspective starts from the subsuming context in which the actors, their actions and the objects they relate to, are all non-separated – so deep is their mutual interdependence. From this level, what the utterance accomplishes is not the portrayal of pre-existing individuated objects, but the creation of the objects and of the subject who denotes them, simultaneously and interdependently. From this interaction of levels, the speaker as self emerges in real time. Shimizu then sketches the ‘improvisational drama model’ of ba. Basho is no longer only the interaction of the self with what is represented, but the self with others in the emerging social field of which the self is a part. Consider the improvisational troupe, who share a story line, but who individually start from indeterminate positions. It is not possible to predict what they will do or which aspects of the story line they will enact. Moreover, the actors are performing in front of, and addressing, an audience. Their enacted representation must respond to that audience's representation. We are now in a complex interactive space. The actors respond to what they assume to be the representations of the audience, as well as to the gestures and expressions of their fellow-actors. In the terms of western theory, we are in the zone of Gricean implicatures and Shelling games (where I try to guess your representation of the matter at hand, and of me). The improvisational actors enact intentions in response to imputed intentions. Out of this complex mirroring, their actions emerge. In ba language, it is out of the holistic basho that the separated basho emerges, and by the ba of the whole that the ba of separation is subsumed and constrained. The improvisational drama model of ba also illustrates that interactions are self-organizing, but individuals are not selforganizing. What does this mean? It means that from the ongoing mutual readjustment of actors, actions and objects to one another, there emerges an order of ba that subsumes the individuals whose distinctness is not the precondition, but the product of interaction. 4. Phenomenology and ba theory There is a deep relation between ba theory and phenomenology. All of the Kyoto School philosophers engaged German thought, and most corresponded with philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, or actually studied with them in Germany.7 The phenomenological focus on the first person point of view is contrary to both primary ba and ba theory, because it starts from the premise that the subject is given, whereas primary ba is devoid of individuation, and ba theory generates the subject from the joining of primary and secondary ba.8 Starting from the distinctness of the subject as an ‘I,’ phenomenology must explain how this individuated ‘I’ is embedded in interactive relations. It does so by layering upon the already separated subject a series of articulations, summarized by the label “intersubjectivity” – a relation that shares key properties with ba and basho. 1. Husserlian empathy, the ability to take the perspective of another. With Schutz (1967), this will become the reciprocity of perspectives, which says that ‘If I put myself in your shoes, the world would look to me as it looks to you.’ 2. The mutuality of what you and I both know and know what we know in common. Part of this is anonymous common sense (typification), and part of it is shared biography. 3. Corporeally mediated co-presence, that is, synchronous reciprocal perceptual access binding interactants to one another, the simultaneity of the expression and the reception, and the fact that the parties to conversation co-occupy a single interactive space-time. 4. What Schutz called the dovetailing of motives, whereby your “in order to” motive (what you are trying to accomplish in speaking) becomes my “because motive” (what I respond to). This dovetailing is again less radical than non-separation, but
7
For excellent synthesis of the Kyoto school and its relation to European philosophy, see Heisig (2001) and Carter (2013). This statement abbreviates what is in fact a varied set of stances of phenomenologists regarding the status of the subject as either basic or derived. Nonetheless, the shared focus on experience and the first person point of view are consistent with the centrality of the subject, and basically different from ba theory. For a useful overview of phenomenology, see Smith (2018). 8
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it further links the parties at the level of intentionality and theory of mind. My intention in responding to you includes my representation of your intention. 5. Cooperation whereby participants engage in the essentially cooperative enterprise of interacting with one another. Note that even conflict can be built on assumption that combatants are cooperating in conflict - they are engaged. This appeal to cooperation, most prominent in the work of Paul Grice, plays a role similar to that of the mutually known story line upon which Shimizu's dramatists improvise. 6. Co-occupancy of the diachronic stream of the real-time present: As Schutz puts it, interactants ‘grow old together.’ 7. Transposability, that is, the capacity to take perspectives other than one's own, as we routinely do in quoted speech, narrative and empathic identification with another being. Taken together, these seven dimensions embed the subject in an intersubjective formation. It is not exactly basho of absolute nothingness, but it is heading in the right direction. So what is the takeaway? Phenomenology has to explain the possibility of non-separation, and ba theory needs to explain the dynamics and telos of separation through articulation. 5. Deixis through the mirror of ba theory We want now to briefly map the deictic field of utterance into the improvisational model of ba. The speaker, like Shimizu's paradoxical painter, is inseparable from the deictic field in which (s)he speaks. In verbal interaction, no clear boundary can be drawn between the participants and the context because the context is the emergent condition and product of their relation. Thus, we start from an a priori relation of interiority and non-separation between the participants and the deictic field. The processes of separation and union are the product of holistic basho interacting with egocentric basho. Now, like the paradoxical painter, the speaker who utters a deictic in reference to her/himself, to a co-present other, or to an object thereby alters the indexical ground from which (s)he speaks. This is the effect of the unavoidable reflexivity of all deictic practice. The deictic field is not merely a physical space, but an emergent relation in which each verbal brush stroke, each improvisation, adjusts to and alters the context it is presumed to represent. Conceptualized through the lens of basho, the deictic field has five key properties: 1. Interiority: like the painter before the canvas in the room (s)he is portraying; the speaker is in the deictic field. 2. Non-separation, realized in deep mutual interdependence of all aspects of the deictic field. The indexical ground joins subject-object, is unarticulated and ultimately unarticulable. 3. Reflexivity: like the painter painting the room he is in, the speaker denoting objects is in the field he is speaking in, thereby altering the basho in which it occurs. 4. Impermanence and ongoing self-organization of the interactive field of deixis. 5. Both basho and the deictic field are scalable, from ultimate ontology to the basho of a social interaction. This is a very important principle, because neither basho nor the deictic field is a thing with a fixed degree of inclusiveness. Both are relational spaces of variable extent. In this sense, basho is very much like a “field” of interaction. For the subject, their own body is the basho in which ‘prise de conscience’ emerges. When applying this concept to linguistic practice, we speak of the indexical ground as a primary ba – but this does not imply that we necessarily anchor our linguistic actions in a metaphysical, infinite order of existence. What counts as primary ba for an interaction is of highly variable scale and quality. Between a Roshi and a Zen monk, it may well be the ultimate primary ba that serves as anchor, that of which one cannot speak without dissolving its unity and distorting its ultimate impermanence. Similarly, the non-separation of primary ba may be absolute or relative (a matter of degree). Interdependence contributes to relative non-separation. 6. Bringing ba theory to language practice Discussion of deixis puts us in the realm of social interaction and language usage. As noted previously, interaction occurs in secondary ba, but it does not necesarily disrupt the non-separation of primary ba. The Yagyu Shinkage Ryu example, in contrast, suggests that the less the shared content, the better the interaction. This is because one opponent, by emptying himself of content in order to internalize the perspective of the other, can attain a state of absolute nothingness, which would result in enhanced understanding and thus better interaction with the other opponent. Likewise, participants who empty themselves of content and attain the level of primary ba may have better interaction.
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Still, as also noted above, the relation of primary ba to an interaction is not fixed and may vary significantly. In this section, we present two excerpts of data to discuss the emergence of interaction from within primary ba. The first excerpt comes from a set of 26 conversations in Japanese from the Mister O Corpus, a larger set of data gathered in order to examine language patterns across languages.9 This particular set consists of dyadic conversations between female students who are close friends. The dyads were told to focus their conversations on the question, “What were you most surprised at?” Each conversation lasted for about 5 min. The excerpt presented below comes at a point in the conversation just after the participant “T” (Teller) has described her surprise at encountering a dying crow on the street. She has done this mostly in “monologue” form as the other participant, “R,” (Recipient) listened. Line 1 seemingly serves as a conclusion as T uses the deictic sore (‘that’) with the subject marker ga to “formulate” (Heritage and Watson, 1979) “that” as fitting the topic of “what surprised me recently.” Excerpt 1: Mister O Corpus as presented in Ueno (2017) 1
T: sore ga saikin ichiban bikkuri shita koto “That’s what surprised (me) the most recently.” 2 R: {laugh} saikin bi karasu ka {laugh} “(What) surprised (you) recentlyda crow, huh?” 3 T: karasu datte shinisoo da[kara agaiteru n da mon “A crow, (I)’m telling (you): (it) was about to die, fighting for its life!” 4 R: [shinisoo na no hajimete mi[kiita “(This) is the first time (I) ever sawdheard about something about to die.” 5 T: [un, sugoi ne, nan daro, karasu gurai okkii to, kekko “Yeah, amazing isn’t it? How should I put this: with something as big as a crow, (it’s) quite…” 6 R: bibiru yo[ne “Scary, isn’t it?” 7 T: [nan daro, un, ningen poi to wa iwanai kedo, doobutsu tte kanji datta “How should I put this: yeah, (I) won’t say (it was) like a human being, but (one) felt (it was) a living animal.” 8 R: {laugh} shikamo kuroi shi ne¼ {laugh} “and also (it was) black, so…” 9 T: ¼kuroi shi, sugoi, demo ne, kawaisoo datta, yappa, shi[nisoo da to, karasu dakedo “(It was) black, super (black), but anyway, (it) was pitiful, with (it) about to died(I) mean, (it) was a crow, but…” 10 R: [aa, nn, n, karasu dakedo “Ah, hmm, (it) was a crow, but...” 11 T: {laugh} kawaisoo da {laugh}“(It) was pitiful!” 12 R: soo datta n da “Was (it) now.”
With the statement karasu datte (‘A crow, (I)’m telling (you)’), in line 3 T seems to emphasize that the information has come from her as the storyteller. Yet, much like the improvisational model of ba, in which the actors perform and react to a fellow actor, the individual self of the storyteller cannot exist separately. Instead, the self only emerges because the fellow actor is there; it only exists as it reads and acts upon the imputed intentions of the fellow actors. It is, as stated earlier in the discussion of the improvisational model, from the holistic basho, represented here by the shared activity of story-telling, that the separated basho emerges. Moreover, in the same way that the improvisational troupe constantly reorders their basho with each uttered line, so do the participants in the story-telling continue to alter the basho to which they are interior. Every utterance and action they -vis one another. Thus, we can see that as T is make changes not just the emerging basho but also their own positions vis-a describing in line 3 the crow's struggle for life, R no longer remains a silent listener as she overlaps in line 4 with an utterance that supports the idea that it was a surprising occurrence. R's overlap in 4, in fact, leads to another overlapped utterance from T in line 5 in which she adds more support for this being a surprising story. She highlights the size of the crow, and just as she ends with the word kekkoo (‘(it's) quite’), R enters again in line 6 to complete her utterance with bibiru (‘scary’). Together then, the two participants have coordinated their speech to enhance the sense of the story from a bikkuri shita koto (‘surprising thing’) to bibiru (‘scary’). This upgrade has emerged not from any one individual but from the holistic basho that has now been reordered according to the non-separated participants realized by mutual interdependence. Indeed, the data indicate that this non-separation of the participants extends from line 7 to the end of the excerpt in line 12 as T and R build on each other's comments through actions such as repetitions, laughter, other-utterance completions to construct the crow as kawaisoo (‘pitiful’) in lines 11 and 12. priori non-separation, shared interiority and reflexivity of interactants This example and the next one illustrate how the a in a primary ba provide resources for mutual engagement. Engagements like the ones shown here unfold in a secondary ba of
9 The Mister O Corpus is a video corpus collected for the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project. The purpose of the corpus is to illuminate cultural differences revealed in interactive discourse. Interactive discourse consists of task discourse, narrative and conversation in six languages and cultures: Japanese, American English, Korean, Libyan Arabic, Thai and Mandarin Chinese. The project was supported by the grant of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science during the years from 2003 to 2013 (Grant numbers: 15320054, 18320069, 20320064 and 23320090).
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linguistic and gestural articulation, thus binding the interactants even as their respective utterances distinguish and hence separate them. It is at this secondary level that the analytic tools provided by linguistics, conversation analysis, multimodal gestural analysis and contemporary pragmatics in its many guises become valuable. When interactants finish each others' utterances, display precision timing in response position, manage their phatic contact with laughter and non-lexical vocalization, and inferentially expand on one another's utterances, they rely not merely on “common knowledge” or reciprocal perception, but more holistically, on being in the same primary, largely presupposed basho. What is usually understood as analysis, as in conversation analysis, is strictly about secondary ba, whereas ba theory starts from the primary level as ontologically and methodologically prior. The second example demonstrates the application of ba theory to discourse in English and is taken from data borrowed from Goodwin (2004) that involves a participant with aphasia. Saft (2014) has previously used this data to describe how the multiple participants merge themselves together in their basho in order to produce a single story, which cannot be attributed to an individual. Here, we examine the data further to elucidate how the self emerges from the non-separation of holistic basho. It should be noted that Chil, the aphasic participant, is able to utter only three recognizable words, “yes,” “no,” and “and.” The excerpt is from a story initiated by Chil about an earthquake (Goodwin, 2004). Excerpt (2): From Goodwin (2004; reproduced in Saft, 2014) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Helen: Chil: Scott: Linda: Chil: Helen: Linda: Chil:
Scott was sleeping (0.2) yes uh-ha what happ[ened [really (0.5) yes en the picture over the be- uh the crib fell [on [oh my: [goodness [no
This story is attributed to Chil (as “Chil's story”) (Goodwin, 2004), but the unfolding story depends equally on the merging of the four participants within the same basho. Helen's first contribution in line 1 is met, after a short pause, with a “yes” from Chil, which in turn leads to an apparent question from Scott in line 5 “what happened?” that is overlapped by Linda's “really” in line 6. After a short pause in line 7, Chil once again moves the story along with a “yes” in line 8, thus prompting Helen to add more information in line 9 that is followed by another overlapped response from Linda in lines 10e11. Chil then reacts to this exchange with his own overlapped utterance, “no,” in line 12. In this way, each individual utterance is crucially important to the emerging story, which is produced incrementally based on the mutual attentiveness and interdependence of the four participants. The participants in this excerpt are thus akin to the painter who starts his or her painting merged together in a room with a blank canvas. Just as the painter begins to alter the canvas by adding content, so do the participants enter secondary ba by undertaking their story, with each individual utterance, like the painter's brush strokes, simultaneously emerging from the holistic basho and changing the ever developing basho. The individual responses derive from the complex readjustments that the participants make as they monitor one another. In other words, the individual responses are made possible by the interdependence and non-separation of the participants. The responses represent the separated egocentric basho in action as it develops from within the holistic basho. There is no separate basho without the holistic basho. The self is subsumed by the holistic order of basho that itself enables the emergence of the self. Through the merged interdependence of the four participants, Chil, together with the others, is constructed as an individual who is a competent participant to the story-telling activity. Note, however, that competence is not necessarily related to the amount of content. Here, it is not just Chil that produces minimal responses; the contributions of the other three participants in these twelve lines are also kept to a relative minimum, including several short pauses. As already suggested, ba and basho allow us to see that interaction need not result in an increase in shared content. Instead, for participants deeply embedded in holistic basho, the secondary ba of interaction may be constituted by minimal and even empty verbal content.
7. Conclusion We have attempted in this brief paper to sketch a conceptual analysis of ba and basho in Japanese thought, and to indicate through examples, how these ideas can be operationalized in cross-linguistic pragmatics. Our argument is not that ba and basho should REPLACE western language theory in any of the domains illustrated, including deixis, verbal interaction in Japanese, and the remarkable recruitment of background and extralinguistic knowledge in conversation between an adult English speaker, Chuck Goodwin, and his father Chil, a stroke patient with impaired ability to speak. Rather, we need both Euro-American theories, such as phenomenology, conversation analysis and the full array of linguistic pragmatics. At the level
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of actual interactions, we are examining processes of articulation, and these are the province of western language theory. But we also need non-western theories. Our argument is that by adopting this new way of analyzing speech context, aspects of human interaction that are taken for granted or left unexplored in our received theories, are suddenly thrust into focus. What we have labelled “interiority” is an unspoken given in Euro-American approaches to the deictic field, but ba theory links this to reflexivity in an entirely new way. Since we know many of the linguistic indexes of reflexivity, this linkage can be empirically researched. Moreover, being within the deictic field has been viewed as an occasionally relevant circumstance of individuation in western theories of definite referring, whereas in ba theory, individuation is merely one of many affordances of the more basic fact of interiority. Given the “field” basis of ba and basho thought, interiority is a concept far more generative than our ideas of being merely “inside” or “in a context.” Non-separation is a radical way of reformulating the sharing between participants, and the co-dependency between objects and participants in an interactive field (hence, intersubjectivity and interobjectivity). Notice, though, that if you START from self-other/subject-object separation, it is the possibility of partial union that must be explained, whereas if you START from non-separation, as we do with primary ba, it is articulation that must be explained. This is fraught with potential for language theory, because language is the most powerful instrument of individuation that humans possess, and now we have a new vision of this instrument. The handling of reflexivity is also more radical in ba theory, since every utterance alters the field in which it is produced, just as the paradoxical painter alters the room by altering the representation of it. The insistence of ba theory on impermanence calls our attention to the dynamic deictic field, and suddenly we no longer assume stability in order then to explain change as variance, but the inverse: we presume constant change, and stabilization of context becomes the focal issue to be explained. How, we might ask, does articulation contribute to (temporary) stabilization? We do not see this question as having arisen in the Euro-American literature, but it is immediate in ba theory. Finally, we come to the key fact that the ba and basho concept applies at indefinitely many scales, from the body as basho of the mind, to nature as basho of the human, to the infinity of time and space as the ultimate, impermanent, non-separated, encompassing basho of we, here, now. We know this fact of scalability about the social contexts of interaction, but we have yet to theorize it convincingly. Moreover, we tend to equate interaction with what happens in the narrow confines of the face-to-face, as if it should show up on a transcript of talk between finite individuals in an articulated second order ba. This is a basic category error that conversation analysis has deformed into an article of faith. From a ba perspective, the multiplicity of scale is like a penumbral embedding of the here-now in the multiply scalable space-time of reality. We think that in this series of reversals there lies an opportunity for empirically hard-nosed pragmatics: the more we attend to language ecology, crosscultural pragmatics, the ethnographic settings of different genres and registers, the more we should consider the move that is classic in anthropological ethnography, namely the move to describing the world in the terms of those we study, and not only in the terms of our received theories. This we think is a challenge worth taking up, and ba and basho point to a way worth following. Acknowledgments The international project on Emancipatory Pragmatics would not have been possible without dedicated support of various people and institutions. Among them, let us mention only those who contributed to this paper. First of all, we acknowledge Dr. Hiroshi Shimizu, whose initial presentations to our group were transformative. Additionally, Mr. Masayuki Otsuka engaged in dialogue to help William F. Hanks learn Japanese ba and basho in comparison with European philosophies. Mr. Benjamin W. Boas created an intensive fieldwork program for W.F.H. to experience ba culture. This included a meeting with Yokota Roshi and Ota Priest at Engakuji (the head temple of the Rinzai school of Zen), who offered W.F.H. the exceptional opportunity to be immersed in the ambiance of ba, and an introduction to the Aikido Yoshinkan head training dojo, where W.F.H. experienced Aikido martial arts. Mr. Yagyu Koichi, the head master of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu swordsmanship, not only lectured and demonstrated the ba spirit of swordsmanship, but also introduced Shinto principles at Ise Grand Shrine. The project has been supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2003 to 2018 (Grant numbers: 15320054, 18320069, 20320064, 23320090, 15H03208, and 17K02746). We also wish to thank anonymous reviewers and guest editors for their valuable comments. References nie du lieu (Logic of place and spirit of place). In: Berque, A., Nys, P. (Eds.), Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine Berque, Augustin, 1997. Logique du lieu et ge (Logic of Place and Human Work). Bruxelles, Ousia, pp. 189e212. Carter, Robert E., 2013. The Kyoto School: an Introduction. State University of New York Press, Albany. Goodwin, Charles, 2004. A competent speaker who can't speak: the social life of aphasia. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 14 (2), 151e170. Hanks, William F., 2016. Basho: a theory of communicative interaction. In: Paper Presented at the 4th International Conference on Linguistics of Ba, Tokyo. March 2016. ms. Hanks, William F., 2017. Utterance context through the lens of Basho. In: Paper Presented at Fyssen Foundation Colloquium, Paris. October 2017. ms. Heisig, James W., 2001. Philosophers of Nothingness. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. Heritage, John, Watson, Rod, 1979. Formulations as conversational objects. In: Psathas, G. (Ed.), Everyday Language. Irvington Press, New York, pp. 123e162. Ide, Sachiko, 1989. Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8, 223e248. Itami, Hiroyuki, 2005. Ba no Ronri to Manejimento (Ba Theory and Management). Toyo Keizai Shinho Sha, Tokyo. James, William, 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Longmans, Green, and Company, London. James, William, 2002 [1909]. The Meaning of Truth. Dover Publications, New York.
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Nagata, Shinya, 2002. Itami kara no soushutsu: Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Ryuso no negai (Genaration from pain: the prayers of the founder of Yagyu Shinkage Ryu). Mind Body Sci. 13, 24e25. Nishida, Kitaro, 2012. Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitaro, Translated by John Krummel and Shigemori Nagatomo. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Saft, Scott, 2014. Rethinking Western individualism from the perspective of social interaction and from the concept of ba. J. Pragmat. 69, 108e120. Schutz, Alfred, 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press, New York. Shimizu, Hiroshi, 1995. “Ba-principle”: new logic for the real-time emergence of information. Holonics 5 (1), 67e79. Smith, David W., 2018. Phenomenology. In: Zalta, E.N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2018 ed. Retrieved March 1, 2019, from. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/phenomenology/ Ueno, Kishiko, 2017. Speaking as Parts of a Whole: Discourse Interpretation from Ba-Based Thinking. Unpublished Dissertation. Japan Women’s University. Yagyu Shinkage Ryu Heihou official site. Retrieved March 1, 2019. from. http://yagyu-shinkage-ryu.jp/yagyu_e.html. William F. Hanks is Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a joint Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1983 and previously taught at the University of Chicago (1983e1996) and Northwestern University (1996e2000). He has been a visiting professor at several institutions abroad, including the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the University of Copenhagen. His specialty is Mayan language and culture, and he has published widely on routine language use, ritual practice, and shamanism, and the colonial history of Yucatan Mexico. Sachiko Ide is Professor Emerita at Japan Women's University, Tokyo. She was president of International Pragmatics Association (2006e2011). Her research field is pragmatics and sociolinguistics. She has been the co-director of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project since 2005. Her interest in exploring wakimae has led to ba theory. Her current research interest is how cultures reflected in language use can be illuminated in terms of ba theory. Yasuhiro Katagiri received his Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1981. He worked at NTT Basic Research Labs and ATR Research Labs. He was director of ATR Media Information Science Laboratories. He is currently president at Future University Hakodate. His research fields are humanecomputer interaction and pragmatics. His current research interest is on the analysis and computational modeling of human interaction practices. lani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where he Scott Saft is currently an Associate Professor in the Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻeliko serves as the Chair of the Linguistics Program. His research focuses on the intersection of language, culture, and social interaction, and he focuses primarily on Japanese, Hawaiian, and Hawaiʻi Creole. Yoko Fujii is a professor in the Department of English at Japan Women's University, Tokyo. She has been a member of the Emancipatory Pragmatics Project since 2005 and authored an article about the ba frame of thinking for a Journal of Pragmatics Special Issue on Emancipatory Pragmatics (2012). Her research focuses on discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, with a current interest in cross-linguistic perspectives on how culturally-rooted practices are reflected in linguistic practices. Kishiko Ueno received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Japan Women's University in 2017. She is currently a professor in the Foreign Language Center at Tokyo City University. Her research fields are pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Her current interests include the relationship among language, thought and culture, and discourse interpretation using ba theory.