Body grammar: a three-layer model of embodied knowledge in ritual performance a phenomenological analysis of pasibutbut and intangible heritage

This preprint develops a conceptual account of the recognition problem in collective optimal experience, asking under what conditions a collective practice becomes identifiable as having been successfully established. Drawing on ethnographic material from Bunun pasibutbut chanting, the paper proposes a three-layer body grammar model—action, perceptual, and consciousness grammar—to clarify how embodied coordination, interactive alignment, and the emergence of bisosilin are structurally organized within performance. Rather than treating collective experience as an aggregation of individual feelings, the paper argues that completion is recognizable only within a relational configuration in which generation and evaluation coincide. The model further introduces the notion of critical convergence to specify the threshold at which collective performance becomes identifiable as complete, and reframes body grammar as a trans-bodily condition that persists across changing participants. By distinguishing between enabling conditions and structural events, the paper contributes to ongoing debates in embodied cognition and collective experience, proposing that knowledge and judgment in ritual practice cannot be reduced to retrospective self-report but emerge within dynamically coupled bodily processes. The analysis advances a theoretical framework for understanding how embodied practices generate, stabilize, and transmit recognizable forms of completion in intangible cultural heritage contexts.