engleski

Bat in dichotomy: myths and representations of bats in the East and West

Based on Ji Xianlin’s synthetic and analytic thinking and Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist ideas of hyperseparation, the authors proposed a comparative approach to the bats in eighteen different folktales and myths around the world. The mythical and the popular culture representations of the bat could be summarized in a few common parameters: a) night and avoidance of the light and sunlight, b) fear, uneasiness, and punishment in European, American and Central American depictions, c) luck, longevity, and helpfulness in stories and legends of Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Pacific origin, d) duality of the beings – as mice, and as birds in Greco-Roman and Slavic traditions. On the trace of the religious and beliefs dichotomy between the Eastern and Western conceptualisation about the bats, the second part of the presentation examines the zooethical question – How to be a bat in time of COVID-19 or how much pandemics we could have? It is noticeable how the “infectious” story on COVID-19 is not bringing along deeply environmental narrative concerning the alleged process in which an alleged Chinese bat in the metonymic Chinese soup becomes the alleged cause and the alleged transmitter of the coronavirus from Wuhan. Deeply environmental story is similar to the plot of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), which concerns the spread of a lethal virus that causes global pandemic in a matter of weeks. In the context of the fictitious virus from Soderbergh’s film, which is considerably more dangerous, and cannot be related to COVID-19, it is necessary to raise the aforementioned zooethical question – so let us repeat the zoo-question – How to be a bat in time of COVID-19?

coronavirus pandemic, bat, sinophobia, (critical) animal studies, comparative, mythology, popular culture

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