Anticipation and Embodied Knowledge: Observations of Enculturating Bodies

Abstract

This article represents a collaborative integration of ethnographic techniques and cognitive neuroscience for examining the dynamics of the movement pedagogy that takes place within Japanese traditional dance. The goal is to examine the extent to which the notion of multiscale entrainment, a hallmark assumption of prospective cognition, can enhance our understanding of the movement pedagogy dynamics that emerge during a given pedagogical session and the larger timescale events that come to be learned over sessions (e.g., the student–teacher relationship, the multiple sessions needed to learn an entire dance, and the annual events associated with Japanese dance pedagogy). The analysis will examine the extent to which Japanese dance pedagogy entails embodied anticipation (i.e., movement learning that gives rise to later movement anticipation) and multiscale embodied anticipation (i.e., multiscale events that come to be recursively associated with movement planning and, as a result, appear in one’s later movement planning). In addition, we analyze the extent to which the Japanese dance studio can be conceptualized as an external scaffold that affords (a) a space for student–teacher interactions, (b) the long-term maintenance of a historical–cultural tradition, and (c) the pedagogically driven emergence of a rich phenomenal sense of belonging to something larger than the timescale of one’s immediate movement planning.