During years, the experts, the observers and the analysts of any edges did not stop regretting the disillusionment of the world (according to Max Weber) and predicting the end of the big fables so mystic as mythical and the big religious stories in the profit of a bigger «technicization» of the globalized and communicating society. Now a recent phenomenon deserves all our attention: the societal reappearance under very diverse forms of the liturgical and the religious within a society referring of rational economic, scientific and technological. It is in fact the powerful resurgence of the sacred that, following the example of the phenomenon of the return of the repressed person in psychoanalysis, never shows itself exactly where we wait for it and contributes ― with a new energy ― to move the criteria of its own definition and to cultivate new territories among which the communication occupies an essential axis. This article thus suggests thinking together of the sacred and the communicating relation to try to establish a new ethics. The sacred having invaded our information society where it appears as an instrument of persuasion of a formidable efficiency. And so the complex industrial objects and the communicating machines gradually replaced all over the world the polytheistic divinities and the God of the monotheist religions. The requirement of a deepened reflection around the concepts of “communication” and “sacred” leads by an analysis of the links weaved with the technologies of information and the communication. Does the sacred communication become the horizon of a new utopia? If yes, it is necessary to determine secondly the sensory and physical stumbling blocks with which she can be confronted. From then on, is imperative the necessity of exceeding the mixture between the communication and the sacred by the elaboration of a communicating ethics.

Today, while modernity seems to plunge us into a context of increasingly impersonal and individualistic, there are still areas in which shared values and cohesion are interrelated elements to the success of the mission and the meaning which it has given. The esprit de corps that live daily military epitomizes the strong sense of belonging without which many missions would result in failures and consequent loss of life.

Does the development of digital communication imply the disappearance of the body? After questioning the concept of “virtual”, this article is based on the analysis of romantic encounter in the Internet age, and of cybersexuality, to show how ICTs are changing the status of the body. Far from disappearing, the body is more than ever staged on the web. Allowing the extension of the body, ICTs are opening a new era for this latter.

Conductor is a mediator between sound and non-sound, between the visible and invisible with a strong social and symbolic connotation. His body lies at the center of the visual rays from which musicians and spectators obtain sources of meaning and significance. While his gesture is audible and sometimes is hidden in its origins, it is transformed into a particular gesture, that is “magic” of musicians partially seen by the audience. However, this transfer of part of the body has also helped to give a sense of the function and whole body. In the other hand, face and posture of the head allows correlation of movements, direct interaction between the conductor and the orchestra, and indirect interaction between the leader and his orchestra and the audience. That is why this article analyzes the communication, especially meta-communication transcended by a person in the conductor's role and function in context of actions and representations of the concert.

The next generation of nurses are deeply not interested in the geriatrics and it could be because of the emotional shock of their first experiment during their training period, when they had to wash an elderly. The subject is trying to understand the social links and the human relationships in the social group of the team and also trying to understand the interaction between someone who doesn't know a lot and someone who is well-informed. The body is then the « subject » of mediation. This experiment is compulsory and it can't be avoided, isn't it a way of building the identity of the next nurses ? What meaning can we give to the care and the take care when the interaction with « the other » is so violent? This test, based on the hygiene and the comfort care, isn't it a sensitive and poly-sensorial experiment in an initiatory ritual ?

The social image of the “career woman” in occupied Shanghai can be explored in the context of the strong discursive vein of the “new woman” in modern China. In the 1930s, “new woman” discourses were extended to the visual field, as represented by the film Xin nüxing. However, while the image of xin nüxing in the printed media was largely controlled by the power of intellectual discourse, to the extent that Yingjin Zhang epitomises it as “panoptic surveillance” in Foucaultian terminology, the cinematic representation of xin nüxing became more complex and dubious, being influenced by more intricate and diverse factors in the mass system of cultural production. The image of “career women” in Shanghai printed media, often buttressed by visual images, should be seen from within this complex mass production system. Being separated from the solid image of the national warrior, which was hoisted high by the left-wing intellectuals, the social image of “career women” in popular culture was produced and consumed in a modern mass system.

While it is a general understanding that the modern history of Korea has begun with the open door of the country in 1876, Korean modern dance is considered to be started from the Seoul performance by Ishii Baku in 1926. Ishii, the famous Japanese pioneer of modern dance, brought huge impact on the Korean community, including Choi Seung-Hee and Cho Taek-Won, who ended up following Ishii to Japan to study under him. Korean modern dance is represented as Shinmuyong, which is originally derived from “Neur Tanz” or “New Dance” against the ballet in the West and was imported into Korea as its Japanese translation. Thus, Japanese New Dance, standing for “a movement that refreshes and modernizes traditional dance”, has widely influenced the Korean dancers. Among them, Choi Seung-Hee (1911∼1969) was a leading artist who began to study the Western modern dance in earnest and applied its style to the Korean tradition for the first time. As a rare case of highly-educated intellectual dander in those days and international figure beyond the East Asia, she contributed to enhancing the social perceptions on the dance arts, and encouraged self-esteem of the Korean people during the Japanese colonial era. Choi, born to upper-class family, had to endure the conventional prejudice against professional dancers usually from the low class and eventually became an female icon of the age as one of the most successful personalities from the field of arts. Korean dancers of Shinmuyong, following Choi, started to be disciplined at an institute and presented a performance at public Theatrical stage. Instead of being an apprentice and a performer for courts, private houses, restaurants or fields, Shinmuyong dancers established a way of commercial performance in the modern Korea. This paper aims to present how Shinmuyong has changed social perception on dance and dancers in the modern period of Korea during the early 20th century. Shinmuyong, typically represented by Choi's modern dance, enthusiastically embraced the modern Western style within the Korean traditions and then advanced towards individual artistic creation. Choi, therefore, is one of the most outstanding pioneers who embodied contemporary modernization of arts and artist in Korea.

This paper will aim to criticize the East Asia film in China and Japan. Specially, I'm willing to reveal the social ideology by analyzing the film in 1900's∼1980's. It is important that we know how social ideology utilize the body in film. Thus this paper will investigate the East Asia film through the body's locomotion as musculature which implied collective unconsciousness. The body in film has played a role in emotional and substitution agency. Especially, Chinese films are more reflecting social ideology than Japanese films. In this way, we can perceive the body as a means which can propagate people in Chinese films and Japanese films.

This paper aims to study the changes of gesture between portraits and portrait photography in the modern era of East Asia, where traditionally ancestral portraits have been enshrined and treasured with high esteem. During the pre-modern period, a portrait was required to preserve ‘a likeness to an object' so that it was considered to represent essential features of the object. Major goal of such portraits is to indicate virtuously ideal figures and to utilize them for the purpose of education, religion, and recording. As the conventional East Asian paintings have placed special importance on expressing a likeness as well as its spirit of the object, “Jeonsin-Sajo” [伝神写照 (a theory suggesting that portrait is what transmits spirit by eye)] and “Ilho-bulsa” [一毫不似 (a theory suggesting that if the portrait is different from the actual person even a single hair, it becomes a whole different person)] have strongly influenced the painting traditions. To be specific, the word “Sajo” is to describe a shape of an object and “Jeonsin” is to draw spirit, which is hidden within an object, so that “Jeonsin-Sajo” is a style of painting that expresses the object's spirit by shape. On the other hand, the word “Ilho” means a single hair that represents the mind of deceased ancestor. On the contrary, such portraits present less movement and the lack of emotion. East Asian sitters, in most cases surrounded by empty background, suggest no particular lively gesture. During the pre-modern period, however, there are several specific characteristics derived from the Chinese portraits, which face the frontal view with the hand position of one on the knee and the other holding a belt on the waist, on the chair covered with the whole tiger skin, and with the placement of the shoes on the platform, which is similar to the shape of Chinese character “Pal” [八(the number eight)]. On the other hand, the Korean portraits are strongly opposed to the pose of hands, which prefer the folded ones, so that they are interpreted not to describe the self-expression and arrogance conducted by the pose of the hands and the frontal view. Compared to the Chinese and Japanese ones, the Korean portraits particularly served for memorial service and ancestor worship ceremony. However, the chair covered with tiger skin, which signifies social wealth and pride, and the placement of shoes in the shape of “Pal”, were widespread until the early modern age of Korea. The photographic portraiture imported by the Western missionary, eventually had a large impact on the East Asian portraits as well as the visual culture of Korea, China, and Japan in the modern period. Hence, the changes of gesture in terms of photography were adjusted and modified by the preference of East Asian society.

The paper tries to explore the potentialities of a cultural semiotics of images through both a comparison with other semiotic approaches and through the example of a specific analysis: a cultural semiotic study of De Chirico's painting Torino printanière. The traditional Greimasian approach to the semiotic analysis of images, it is argued, fails in explaining how their meaning depends on the cultural contexts of their production and reception. Likewise, the traditional Echian approach underestimates the fact that ideally cooperative spectators are nowadays more an exception that the norm: as a consequence of the globalization and digitalization of images, more and more people lack an adequate “encyclopedia” to interpret images they are confronted with. The paper therefore claims that a cultural semiotics of images is urgently needed, and contends that the school of Moscow/Tartu can provide many suggestions about how to conceive it. According to Jurij M. Lotman's theory, indeed, images must be interpreted in relation to their semiosphere, a hypothesis ― formulated through the meta-discourse of semiotics ― about how a culture produces and manages meaning both inside such culture and in relationships with what such culture considers as external to it. However, the paper points out, in Lotman's theory the semiosphere is not only a repository of texts, but also a mechanism that produces them. As a consequence, semioticians can both study a semiosphere in order to understand the meaning of an image, and analyze an image in order to understand the meaning of a semiosphere. The paper concludes that only the synergic approach between micro-semiotic and macro-semiotic analysis ― including the methods of post-greimasian semiotics ― is able to formulate solid hypotheses not only on what images meant at the moment of their production, but also what they mean when they are received in a completely different semiosphere, by people whose visual culture is sometimes radically different from that of the image's original context.