The public demands of information will increase during the crisis and the social media accounts run by governmental sectors is one of the major sources where the public obtains information. This study focuses on the practices of Beijing health commission, an authoritative official outlet, in posting COVID-19 related information from a governmental stance. We explore the content of these social media posts and manner of posting during the COVID-19 crisis. Based on a data set of 1,422 Weibo posts related to (...) the early 2022 COVID-19 wave in Beijing, we identified the theme of reports of confirmed cases and travel paths, and propagandistic objective as the most prominent. From analysed posts and the identified themes, the preliminary findings suggested that the government gave its priority to maintain its legitimacy during the crisis. Thus, by borrowing the concept of paternalism, we argued that arising the public’s attention of crisis is what government applied to achieve its propaganda goal, which aims to practicing its paternalistic governance in China. (shrink)

This article discusses the molecularization of the body and the meanings pointed out via cyborg bodies in the context of animated characters. We analyze films of Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995), Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045- Sustainable War (Shinji Aramaki Michihito and Fujii Kenji Kamiyama, 2021), Gunnm (Hiroshi Fukutomi, 1993), and Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez, 2019) in the context of related philosophical discussions. We carry out the discussion about the body on two axes. First, we examine forms (...) of presenting the modular bodies and discuss their socio-cultural connections. In these narratives, the evolution of the body beyond organic boundaries transforms it into a space where the character reflects the subjectivity and a tool that offers a narcissistic experience of omnipotence regarding bodily strength and competence. However, it sometimes causes the characters to become alienated from their bodies and engage in existential inquiries. Thus, secondly, we examine the existential inquiries/crises of the characters arising from the modularization of their bodies and the philosophical connotations that these emphases indicate. If on this axis, posthumanist arguments that stand out with objections to Cartesian distinctions such as machine-human, mind-body, woman-man, and anthropocentric approaches constitute the focus of the discussions. (shrink)

The article examines the image of zombies in Chinese culture, the traditional perception of their appearance and internal characteristics. A wide scope of written sources served as the basis of the study: inscriptions on oracle bones, ancient fortune-telling calendars, historical treatises, chronicles and commentaries on chronicles, essays on geography and medicine, fiction of old and modern China, as well as entries and comments from the Chinese blogosphere. The authors examine how the idea of evil spirits (with a body or bodiless (...) ones) first appeared in the religious worldview of the ancient Chinese, and trace its origin to the doctrine of existence of multiple souls in one person. The article also details the formation of the pictorial image of Chinese zombies: animated corpses covered with hair or dressed as government officials, with their arms extended forward, hopping on straight legs unable to bend their knees. As for the functional characteristics of zombies, the authors discuss not only their well-known features (e.g., cannibalism), but also their deep inner connection with water and drought. In conclusion, the authors explore the evolution of zombies in modern urban legends and demonstrate the continuity of traditional demonology that develops into modern narrative. Apart from that, the article contains a number of analogies and comparisons of the Chinese image of zombies with other nations’ mythological tradition. (shrink)

This article discusses the significance of the study of Lenin's corporeality in the context of mass and elite culture of the post-Soviet space. The author highlights the importance of understanding the role of Lenin's images in the ideological and political context and suggests analyzing them using theoretical tools. The article also shows that interest in Lenin's images persists in contemporary mass and elite culture, being realized in such strategies of representation of Lenin's bodily aspects as phantasmagoric mystification, “skomoroshchestvo”, annihilation and (...) dehumanization. The phantasmagoric strategy of representing the leader of the world proletariat includes attempts to depict Lenin in unusual and paradoxical bodily images, often with elements of fantasy and mystification. The strategy of “skomoroshchestvo” allows researchers and artists to play with Lenin's image and reinterpret it in a comical and absurd way. The strategy of annihilation emphasizes the contrasting views and emotions associated with Lenin's image in the contemporary world and provokes discussions about the boundaries of art, symbolism and respect for historical figures. The strategy of dehumanizing Lenin in the representation of his corporeal image is expressed in transformations that take him away from his human historical context and reduce him to an object of irony, satire and symbolic associations. (shrink)

This is a review of Franziska Bork-Petersen's book “Body Utopianism. Prosthetic Being Between Enhancement and Estrangement”, which discusses the changes in corporeality and the use of various tools that have become an important part of contemporary culture. It explores the relationship between culture, the transformation of corporeality and our perception of these changes. The book offers an interesting perspective on the changing corporeality of the contemporary world and its socio-cultural implications.

The article is devoted to the body and corporality in the genre of dystopia (literary and audiovisual works). The study is an extract from an unpublished monographic work on body images, manipulations, procedures, processes, and marginal, specific objects that shape the interiors of dystopian worlds. Analytics and conceptual generalizations are carried out on the example of specific cases – classic novels by Stanislav Lem, George Orwell, Evgeny Zamyatin and relatively new works by James Dashner and Andrey Dashkov. The arbitrary choice (...) of authors and books is determined by the specifics of the cultural and philosophical approach and the desire to avoid the dominance of totalizing logic and ideas. The general and arbitrary logic of cases is constituted by a conditional sequence of various objects – operations, procedures, body locations (topology) and marginals. Together, these objects, directly related to the physicality of the characters, form a specifically dystopian interior. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is a new approach from an interdisciplinary standpoint to the long lasting phenomena of the vampires. Consequently, I have drawn on from multiple sources in history, folklore, literary studies and anthropology. As monsters, they have been analysed in the light of their symbolic meaning. Previous studies place them in realms of mythical thinking and belonging to a liminal state of the nature-culture classification. As undead, their specificity is to trespass sides, a matter of fear for (...) the living. Although we want to consider our civilization as rational and free from superstition, undead keep coming back through different narrative media. I will try to address that question by emphasising the liminality of death and the allure of immortality. The chosen case of research is Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and the film adaptation directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1992). By comparing the changes in the characters and the plot I have tried to frame them as different versions along the history of a myth. Any social order need to set boundaries but, being humans, we are tempted to trespass at least through fiction. (shrink)

Serial killers have been a popular topic in literature for centuries, appearing in works of fiction, non-fiction, and even poetry. In literature, serial killers often represent the dark side of human nature, and their stories often explore the depths of depravity and the psychological motivations behind their heinous acts. Examples of serial killers can be found throughout history and mythology. With all that the public’s attention is usually focused on the serial murders of the latest decades, with the historical cases (...) still generally remaining in the obscure. The reason for that lack of publicity is that serial killers in antiquity are difficult to identify, because the concept of serial killing is a relatively modern one. One of the pleasant exceptions is a book by Debbie Felton “Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myths and History” published by University of Texas Press, 2021, 235 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4773-2357-1 (paperback edition). This article reviews the book and comments on its contents and style. (shrink)

This paper reviews A.M. Lobok's monograph, The Anthropology of Myth. It was published in 1997 in Ekaterinburg by the publishing house Bank of Cultural Information, but is still little known in the scientific community and belongs to the philosophical underground. This has necessitated the creation of a review work to present The Anthropology of Myth to a wider readership. Despite an almost quarter-century gap between the year of publication and the present, the reviewed monograph is one of the most interdisciplinary (...) to date and may be of interest to researchers specialising in mythology, general myth theory, philosophical anthropology, cultural philosophy, physical anthropology, pedagogy and body studies. (shrink)

In the first part of the work, entitled “The Beauty, the Beast and the Red Hare” published in “Corpus Mundi” Vol. 3(2), 2022, I trace the origin of the “Chain Scheme” legend in the Chinese historical chronicles, analyze the development of the plot in the poetry, fiction and other works of art and make conclusions about the interpretation of the main characters’ morals and motivations in pre-modern Chinese culture. In the present paper, which is the second part of the same (...) research, I analyze artistic devices and narrative tropes in TV versions of “Three Kingdoms”, I comment on the changes that the plot has undergone in the course of history and especially in modern TV-dramas and make some conclusions as to the clash of traditional and modern value systems. (shrink)

The article deals with the analysis of the corporeality of Russian vampires, naturalized in the domestic serial cinema at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. The vampire was a marginal character in the Russian cultural tradition of the 19th century, combining folkloric traits with stable motifs of the Western Gothic novel. In Soviet culture, he was a total stranger, since he belonged to the subcensorship theme of mysticism and anti-Soviet propaganda. The vampire expansion of the 1990s (...) strengthened the vampire myth as a Westernized project that assimilated poorly and slowly into domestic soil. Only a reinterpretation of the Soviet Union's image as part of Soviet nostalgia led to a flowering of the national vampire theme. This investigation is aimed at assembling the social body of the vampire clan (Vampires of the Middle Zone, 2021, 2022) into a single whole by means of Soviet nostalgia, which requires us to reconsider the contemporary trends in the dynamics of the canonical corporeality of the vampire in Western mass culture and to apply them to the Soviet-oriented model of Russian history. The author demonstrates the peculiarities of the Smolensk vampire's corporeality. It is interpreted as a tool of his adaptation to human society and, at the same time, the formation of his own family sociality. The author concludes that sovietism is a way of distributing the clan's social functions and a strategy of axiological marking of personal relationships. (shrink)