Search Results (68)

This article argues that Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, together with the older flying-saucer and UFO formations only partially displaced by the contemporary acronym, should be read as a hauntological media formation. Through it, modern culture registers recurrent appearances that remain difficult to dismiss and equally difficult to stabilise within a public ontology. Drawing on Jung, Derrida, Fisher, Greg Eghigian, Jodi Dean, Timothy Melley, and recent work on The X-Files, the essay approaches UAP culture less as a problem to be solved than as a zone in which mediation, secrecy, historical fantasy, and political feeling become newly legible. The genealogy begins with Jung’s modern myth of things seen in the skies and Eghigian’s reconstruction of UFO culture as a historical world. It then moves through Hergé’s Flight 714 to Sydney and the countercultural extraterrestrial utopianism of Easy Rider before turning to the original and revival runs of The X-Files. The article argues that UAP function as an ontological vanishing point internal to modern media culture, where appearance persists without settling into ordinary knowledge, and where damaged institutions continue to mediate the relation between truth, authority, and futurity. Full article

The text examines the formation and persistence of the Swiss national imaginary as a construct shaped by enduring symbols, narratives, and figurative images. Building on theories of collective identity and Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary, it argues that Swiss national identity emerged through a long cultural process in which the Alps, the herdsman, and eventually the peasant became dominant symbolic figures. Through literary works, historical writing, visual culture, and political discourse, these images acquired normative force and provided a shared framework for interpreting collective experience. The study traces how eighteenth-century idealizations of Alpine life, reinforced by authors such as Haller, Rousseau, and Gessner, established a myth of origins that overshadowed later political transformations. It shows how the bourgeois elites of 1848 chose symbolic continuity over revolutionary rupture, allowing the peasant figure to become the central bearer of national distinctiveness. The analysis highlights tensions between modernity and tradition, progress and nostalgia, and urban and rural imaginaries. It concludes that despite attempts to introduce modern symbolic figures, the Alpine-pastoral tableau continues to dominate the Swiss imaginary, revealing a persistent divergence between Switzerland’s historical development and the symbolic field through which it understands itself. Full article

Suffering and theodicy are two interconnected concepts: while the former indicates the embodied personal experience of pain, the latter represents the theological effort to explain the existence of suffering and evil by reconciling them with the idea of a world created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good God. From a sociological perspective, the first scholar to address the problematic relationship between these two concepts was Max Weber. The problem of suffering in Weber was linked, first of all, to the process of social rationalization, that is, to the growing predominance of formal rationality in Western social life, the ultimate outcome of which he famously described through the metaphor of the “iron cage” as the existential suffering of modern Western humanity. Subsequently, in his Sociology of Religion, he adopted the concept of “disenchantment” to refer to the cultural rationalization of worldviews as a process characterizing most Asian religions within a broader universal perspective. According to Weber’s comparative investigation, at the origin of all attempts at religious rationalization lies the same universal problem of theodicy, namely the search for an explanation capable of justifying the unequal distribution of the goods of happiness among human beings and the resulting suffering, perceived as unjust. For Weber, the paradox of theodicy consists in the fact that the rationalization of thought (worldviews) and action (conducts of life), in an attempt to confer meaning on and alleviate suffering on the basis of one of the two conceptions of salvation (rebirth or redemption), instead produces the unintended consequence of making the human condition even more vulnerable to the experience of suffering, since it comes to be regarded as morally more outrageous and intellectually more unacceptable. Later, the founders of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno, essentially took up and expanded the Weberian thesis of the paradox of theodicy by showing that the second disenchantment brought about by modernity affected the rationalization of metaphysical–religious worldviews through the return of the irrational mythical–magical forces that had once been subjugated and turned into myth by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, the loss of individual freedom, reduced to a mere functional response within modern political and economic bureaucratic systems, comes to coincide with the loss of meaning of any autonomous cultural framework rationally grounded in value orientations. Habermas further developed Weber’s thesis of the loss of freedom by situating the process of social rationalization within a broader paradox that illustrates the contemporary inability of colonized lifeworlds, now completely bureaucratized and technicized, to confer meaning on the subjective experience of suffering. More recently, in the so-called Anthropocene, a non-linear and non-unidirectional dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment has emerged, in which the two coexist as constitutive processes of modernity, allowing the paradox of theodicy and suffering to be reconsidered in terms of a new anthropodicy. Full article

Although radon measurements have been carried out in most countries for several decades, a rigorous methodology for assessing the reliability (as well as the effectiveness) of indoor radon testing between short-term and long-term measurements has not yet been established at either the national or international level. National regulators, lacking scientific justification, arbitrarily set the duration of indoor radon testing (from a few minutes to several months) preferring long-term measurements simply because it “seems more reliable”. To solve this fundamental regulation problem, an original (innovative) methodology is proposed based on the algorithms of the previously published Rational Method for indoor radon testing, which ensures 95% decision-making reliability within modern metrological concepts. A comparison of the reliability (and effectiveness) between short-term and long-term measurements can be made by taking into account the radon situation at both national and global levels. The obtained dependence of the mean (among 26 countries) percentage of definite (reliable) decisions vs. the duration of measurements indicates: (i) the greater effectiveness of using short-term measurements compared to long-term ones, as well as (ii) the excessive focus of national and international regulators only on instrumental uncertainty within QA/QC to the detriment of temporal (key) uncertainty in decision-making. Key conclusion: The established practice of radon regulation on both global and national levels contains a number of underlying myths, and therefore clearly needs to be rethought and updated within a rational (scientific) strategy. A vital necessity are specific experimental (field) studies to verify (clarify) the national values of the temporal (key) uncertainty of indoor radon (and thoron EEC), as well as the creation of simple and effective (inexpensive but reliable) IoT tools for large-scale measurements of indoor radon through the involvement (and at the expense) of the population. Full article

Objectives: Endocrine neoplasms, as a general rule, show systemic, neuro-inflammatory and metabolic consequences, known as paraneoplastic syndrome. The comorbidity of thyroid tumors with neurological and autoimmune diseases prompt looking for common neuro-immuno-endocrine mechanisms of these disorders. While most TCs are well described, there is a gap in the literature after the isolation of oncocytic/Hürthle cell carcinoma (HCC), as a unique type due to immunoendocrine and metabolic features (low TSH-receptor expression and radioiodine avidity). The aim of this study was to collect clearly defined reports of HCC (as a separate entity) and to attempt determining common clinical symptoms and the usefulness of various diagnostic techniques (comprehensive critical review). This may be an introduction to modern treatment (patient-centered care) since the main cause of mortality is not local progression or metastases. Results: Until now, due to misnomenclature and data misinterpretation, HCC has been treated according to general standards (with overuse of TSH-ST and RIA). High thyroglobulin level, decreased total thyroxin (with normal FT3 and spontaneous decrease in TSH), hypercalcemia, as well as the “reverse flip-flop” phenomenon, as common symptoms, indicate the neuroendocrine origin of HCC. Sparse, well-documented lymph node metastases are another feature, although from few studies. Most studies omit the N stage. Whole-body ¹³¹iodine and ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose scintigraphy may be useful before FNAB. Fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB), as a “gold standard” in early diagnosis of thyroid nodules, delays HCC diagnosis because of the inability to determine a benign/malignant nature. Conclusions: Final HCC outcome may be affected by various overlapping immunoendocrine factors (paraneoplastic effects). Due to very few thyroid function tests performed in HCC, we have proposed a set of basic laboratory analyses, core biopsy in HCC differentiation, and diagnostic chain for standardization. According to the review, adaptation and treatment of HCC based on existing standards for other thyroid cancers seem to be insufficient, and the risks outweigh the benefits. The key recommendations resulting from the 5th edition of the WHO Classification of Endocrine Neoplasms are only the beginning of refuting many myths and biases. Full article

This study proposes an innovative instructional approach to promote scientific literacy by integrating the Nature of Science and the Nature of Scientific Inquiry with experimental practice and the history of physics. The aim is to foster a deep understanding of how scientific knowledge is constructed and to promote informed trust in science. Using an explicit and reflective methodology, the intervention combines experimental activities with historical reflection. The core of the learning sequence is the experimental reconstruction of Galileo’s studies on falling bodies, based on the historical manuscript folio 116v, an original document that provides the empirical evidence for the law of falling bodies, illustrating the transition from raw experimental data to mathematical formalization. Through this activity, students engage with key epistemic aspects of scientific practice, including the management of uncertainty—distinguished into statistical/aleatory and structural/epistemic forms—the probabilistic nature of scientific knowledge, the predictive power of models and theories, and the underdetermination of scientific theories. Additional themes addressed include the role of thought experiments, the importance of communicating results for scrutiny and validation, the function of models as mediators between theory and phenomena, and the process of de-idealization. The study also challenges the persistent myth of a single, linear “scientific method,” highlighting instead the theory-laden character of scientific inquiry and the central role of the scientific community. This dimension is explored through the historical comparison between Galileo and Mersenne, which illustrates elements of the scientific ethos and the role of peer review as a mechanism for the correction and refinement of knowledge. The results obtained with pre-service teachers, with whom this instructional sequence was implemented, indicate that this contextualized approach facilitates the overcoming of a view of science as a set of absolute truths. Instead, it promotes a more mature understanding of science as a dynamic, provisional, and self-correcting human enterprise, while equipping future citizens with the critical tools necessary to navigate the challenges of the twenty-first century. Full article

The easily defanged myth that baby rattlesnakes (genera Crotalus and Sistrurus) are more dangerous than adults has persisted in North America despite all evidence to the contrary. The most often cited reason for the babies-more-dangerous (BMD) myth is the venom-dump (VD) hypothesis: babies, in contrast to adults, cannot control how much venom they expend, and therefore inject all of it when biting. We undertook three approaches to explore the origin, transmission, and prevalence of this myth and its most frequent explanation. First, we examined historical newspaper accounts. From 130 newspaper stories mentioning the relative danger of baby rattlesnakes, we identified a timeline in which (1) most stories prior to 1969 were factually correct; (2) the BMD myth and VD hypothesis likely originated in the mid-to-late 1960s and became entrenched in California, especially, from 1970 to 1999; (3) factually incorrect statements subsequently prevailed throughout North America from 2000 to 2014; and (4) factually correct stories regained prominence with apparent effective messaging success from 2015 onward. We further learned that general information stories about rattlesnakes, more often citing subject experts like university professors, were much more likely to provide accurate information than local snakebite stories, which more often cited health professionals (e.g., physicians, veterinarians, pharmacists) and emergency responders (e.g., police and fire officers) who frequently supplied misinformation. Second, we surveyed familiarity with the BMD myth and VD hypothesis among 53 university classrooms (including one high school) representing 3751 students across 29 states within the United States. Consistent with the California media’s outsized influence on misinformation transmission, familiarity with the myth was greatest in the southwestern states (52.6%) and declined moving north and east, with the least familiarity in the northeastern states (16.4%). Third, a small survey of 75 emergency responders and health professionals from Southern California revealed that a whopping 73.3% actually believed the BMD myth. Numerous organizations generally regarded as authoritative further amplified the misinformation, especially on the internet, where some content persists to this day. Unfortunately, belief in the BMD myth and VD hypothesis can lead to negative consequences, including misinformed risk-taking by those encountering snakes, unwarranted fear among snakebite victims, and inappropriate care delivered by misinformed or patient/family-pressured medical professionals. Our findings target health professionals and emergency responders as priority audiences for education. Full article

Humans inherit an ethical condition shaped by suffering: biological, historical, and relational. Buddhism begins by diagnosing this suffering as inherent to embodied life, while Western theology situates suffering and morality as consequences of the Fall. Levinas reframes suffering not as a problem to be extinguished but as the very site of ethical awakening: the Other’s vulnerability commands an infinite responsibility. Maria Dimitrova’s comparative work on Levinas and Buddhist thought reveals how compassion and responsibility illuminate one another and how both exceed purely ontological frameworks. This paper weaves these traditions into a single genealogy of ethics—from Edenic innocence to the historical moral burden of exile, from biological interdependence to the modern “Necropolis,” and finally toward a speculative future in which technology may allow a reconfiguration of suffering itself. The result is a proposal that ethics is neither eternal nor arbitrary but a pilgrimage arising from suffering and oriented toward a horizon of grace made possible not by divine restoration but by human and post-human agency. Full article

This essay reads Grant Allen’s “Pallinghurst Barrow” as folk horror about the late-Victorian spiritualist debates. We read Allen’s story as not only sympathetic to spiritualism, but also as critical of the gendered and genred politics of fin-de-siècle scientific materialism which would preclude such occult experiences—or what we frame as feminine ways of knowing. In both form and content, “Pallinghurst Barrow” challenges masculine science by foregrounding the powerful influence (on Rudolph, the protagonist) of the Gothic ghost story (“gipsy” Rachel’s cautionary tale, repeated by young Joyce). Allen’s interest in the folkloric origins of religion can be traced back to Herbert Spencer’s “Ghost Theory,” a proto-sociological explanation for the cultural construction and transmission of myth (or spirits). A lifelong friend and devotee of Spencer, Allen employs his mentor’s sociology as a way to make sense of non-material forces, including the ghost story circle and its production of Gothic awe or wonder (the wonder tale). Ultimately, then, Allen’s infamous folk horror reads as an allegory of late-Victorian spiritualist debates and, more importantly, as a defence of feminine modes of knowledge and myth-making through collective story-telling. Full article

This essay examines how contemporary Anglophone Chinese women writers rewrite the imagery of Chinese snake women through speculative retellings that foreground sisterhood, queer desire, and diasporic identity. Drawing on queer diaspora studies and feminist criticism, I argue that Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake (2024) revise the figure of the Chinese snake woman to imagine forms of female intimacy and kinship that transcend heteronormative and patriarchal frameworks. In these works, sisterhood operates both as a familial bond and as an intimate, queer relation charged with affective, physical, and occasionally erotic intensity. The original White Snake legend—one of China’s Four Great Folktales—has long invited queer readings, especially through the complex relationship between White Snake and her companion Green Snake. In dialogue with the Chinese snake myth, Lai and Koe relocate the snake woman into speculative worlds shaped by queer desire, racial marginalization, and transnational migration. In Salt Fish Girl, Lai reimagines the reincarnations of the half-snake Chinese mother goddess Nu Wa across colonial South China and near-future bio-capitalist Canada, portraying a cross-temporal lesbian love between the protagonist and the titular Salt Fish Girl. In Sister Snake, Koe’s protagonists—serpent sisters Su and Emerald, separated between Singapore and New York—disrupt normative family scripts while forging a fragmented but enduring affective bond. Through the motif of the Chinese snake woman, these works construct imaginative spaces in which intimate sisterhood subverts patriarchal and national containment, advancing a queer vision of female togetherness. Full article

In 1844, Hermann Müller, a Catholic law professor from Würzburg, published a hefty volume on Nordic Greekdom and the Original History of North-Western Europe. The study claimed to hold definitive proof of the north-European origins of Hellenism, Abrahamic monotheism, and the entire human race. Germanic history was not German at all, Müller argued, but Celtic, and underneath it lay another hidden history of Nordic Greekdom, of which Southern Hellenism had been but a minor branch. Though it is today largely forgotten, Müller’s book elicited several responses upon publication and as late as the 1920s in Nazi literature. This article examines the reception of Nordic Greekdom as a striking example of the politicization of antiquity as an origin myth, arguing that the array of modern historicizations of antiquity and of Christianity’s place within it forms a ruptured and incoherent continuity of which ideologies as dissimilar as liberalism, Christian conservatism, and fascism—to name but a few—were all a part. Tracing this variety across ideological divides avoids overly rigid dichotomies such as the distinction between theological and racial antisemitism, while acknowledging the persistent, vast significance of Christianity within these discussions, whether as a living faith or as a discarded inheritance. Full article

The origin of the Wutong deity, a controversial figure in Chinese folk religion, has long been an unresolved academic issue, hindering a clear understanding of its complex godhead and its derivative cults, such as the Five Road Deities of Wealth. This study aims to provide a comprehensive etymological solution to this long-standing problem. Through a systematic investigation combining cross-cultural linguistic analysis, comparative mythology, and socio-historical contextualization, this paper traces the deity’s evolution from its prototype to its final forms. The study argues that the Wutong deity’s prototype is the Buddhist Yakṣa General Pañcika, known in early China as the “Wudao Dashen” (Great Deity of the Five Paths). Its core godhead was formed by inheriting Pañcika’s attribute as a wealth deity, while degrading his myth of prolificacy into a licentious characteristic by conflating it with indigenous stereotypes of Yakṣas. Its name resulted from an orthographic corruption of “Wudao” to “Wutong,” and its “one-legged” image from a phono-semantic misreading of its transliterated name, “Banzhijia (半支迦).” This transformation was catalyzed by the severance of the Tangmi (唐密) lineage and the concurrent rise of commercialism in Song-dynasty Jiangnan. This evolutionary chain reveals the complete process by which a foreign deity was seamlessly integrated into the indigenous Chinese belief system, a “Flowing Pantheon,” through misreading and reconstruction, vividly illustrating the pluralistic and harmonious nature of Chinese religion. Full article

By 2050, it is estimated that approximately 200 million people will be displaced due to the impacts of climate change. Vulnerability to climate change is shaped not only by environmental factors but fundamentally by systemic power relations and structural conditions present at both the places of origin and destination. In Latin America, climate-displaced persons predominantly settle in marginalised neighbourhoods, where widely accepted informality facilitates their rapid arrival but obstructs genuine progress and full integration as urban citizens. This paper critically examines the prevailing myths that justify the persistence of informality, revealing the socioeconomic challenges faced by climate migrants in the region. These four dominant myths are (1) Latin America’s inherently low productivity levels; (2) concessions by the ruling class enabling excluded groups to merely survive; (3) the perceived privilege of marginalised neighbourhoods to generate income outside formal legal frameworks, which supports their social capital; and (4) the limited benefits associated with formalisation. Debunking these myths is essential for developing effective public policies aimed at reducing informality and promoting inclusive urban integration, ultimately benefiting both climate migrants and host communities. Full article

Oral narratives play a crucial role in shaping the historical consciousness of Indigenous communities in Northeast India, where history writing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Among the Mizos, Nagas, Khasis, Kuki-Chins, and other Indigenous tribes of Northeast India, including the Bodos, the Garos, the Dimasas, or the Karbis of Assam, much of what is considered written history emerged during British colonial rule. Native historians later continued it in postcolonial India. However, written history, especially when based on fragmented colonial records, includes interpretive gaps. In such contexts, oral traditions provide complementary, and frequently, more authoritative frameworks rooted in cultural memory and collective transmission. Oral narratives, including ritual poetry, folk songs, myths, and folktales, serve as vital mediums for reconstructing the past. Scholars such as Jan Vansina view oral narratives as essential for understanding the histories of societies without written records, while Paul Thompson sees them as both a discovery and a recovery of cultural memory. Romila Thapar argues that narratives become indicative of perspectives and conditions in societies of the past, functioning as a palimpsest with multiple layers of meaning accruing over generations as they are recreated or reiterated over time. The folk narratives of the Mizos and Angami Nagas not only recount their origins and historical migrations, but also map significant geographical and cultural landmarks, such as Khezakheno and Lungterok in Nagaland, Rounglevaisuo in Manipur, and Chhinlung or Rih Dil on the Mizoram–Myanmar border. These narratives constitute a cultural understanding of the past, aligning with Greg Dening’s concept of “public knowledge of the past,” which is “culturally shared.” Additionally, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith posits, such stories, as embodiments of the past, and of socio-cultural practices of communities, create spaces of resistance and reappropriation of Indigenous identities even as they reiterate the marginalization of these communities. This paper deploys these ideas to examine how oral narratives can be used to decolonize grand narratives of history, enabling Indigenous peoples, such as the Mizos and the Angamis in North East India, to reaffirm their positionalities within the postcolonial nation. Full article

This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings. Full article