The article presents an analysis of the famous Indian myth about the dissected body of Sati, which became the basis for both a number of philosophical concepts and local cults, linked together by the idea of the wholeness of the dispersed body of the goddess. On a broad historical, cultural and ethnographic material, the author explores the categories of corporeality, ideas about boundaries, identity, belonging, ethics and aesthetics of the body, about social and ritual bodies, about the instrumental function of the human body as a universal measure, simultaneously serving as an object and subject of action and cognition.

The cult of Buddha relics found its diverse reflection in the literature of thе period of wide spread of Buddhism in India. It was one of the manifestations of the entire complex of Buddhist culture. The connections of that cult with other forms of religious activity are of great interest. Multiple descriptions of sacred places contained in the texts of Chinese pilgrims who traveled all over the Indian subcontinent provide the researcher with a wealth of material and gives an idea of the many cult centers and revered relics, their types and their distribution in space. Preserved in stupas and monasteries “Buddha’s hair” belonged to the most important category of relics, called “bodily” (śariradhātu). The analysis of the information collectedby pilgrims compared with Indian hagiographic texts makes it possible to identify various semantic associations related to “hair relics”. In the paper an issue is also touched upon the problem of the relationship between the cult of the Buddha’s hair with pictorial canons and formulaic texts of the Buddhist tradition.

The present case study dwells upon the vision of a human head in the popular mind of the Naga tribes living in the state of Nagaland, India, in whose perception a human head has direct association with the fertility of both man and land, which triggered the desire to possess more heads and, consequently, resulted in head hunting once widespread in the countries of South-East Asia, Burma, Indonesia, New Zealand. The paper is based on the material provided by the monographs of British anthropologists published in early twentieth century and the field work done by the author in Naga villages after 2012.

The article considers traditional ideas of the peoples of the Caucasus about what rituals and ceremonies had to be observed during the first shaving of the “uterine” hair and the first cutting of the baby’s nails in order for him to become a worthy person, as well as ideas about the magical meaning of hair, first of all female.

The paper considers the daily life of the “women for pleasure” yu:jo in the Yoshiwara quarter of the Edo period. It describes the concept of female attractiveness in the last shogunate era in Japan and describes cosmetic procedures in the context of the concept about the body beauty. The author focuses on individual parts of the body and their transformation: teeth, nails, hair, feet, etc. The article provides examples of such transformations as blackening teeth o-haguro, staining nails and whitening the face with a special composition of o-shiroi. It also describes the rituals common in the pleasure quarters of the Edo period, in which some parts of the body are involved: swearing an oath of love and fidelity by chopping off a finger, gifting nails and locks of hair, etc. The author analyzes popular images that visitors to the Yoshiwara were inspired by during the Edo period.

The article presents a semiotic analysis of the tattooing practices in term of socio-symbolic communications. The author compares the social, religious, informational aspects of tattoos in archaic, traditional and modern communities. The social meanings of the signs and symbols are analysed in the representation and self-identification practices.
Divers levels of interactions of personality and society are studied. Questions are raised about the semantic meanings of the statement in the field of sociality and asociality, polysemantics and monosemantics. The article is based on an impromptu survey conducted by the author, the informational occasion for which was a conflict between a French kindergarten teacher who almost completely covered his body with a tattoo, and his employer.

The article deals with such a beauty “anti-standard” among a number of peoples of South Asia as a flat nose. Attention is paid to the contemporary functioning of the phenomenon in culture, as well as to its possible origin. The vocabulary used to describe such a physical trait, as well as the mention of a flat nose in folklore and the connotations associated with it, are analyzed. It is suggested that a flat nose as an “anti-standard” of beauty has been entrenched in the culture of South Asia since a very long time, and two main factors influenced its formation. These are physical characteristics of the non-Aryan peoples defeated in ancient times, some of whom later became low castes, and the practice of cutting off the nose as punishment for crimes related to the honour of the family and society.

The article studies the ideas about the human body in one of the most culturally conservative regions of Europe – Sicily; the focus is on the image of the phallus in the local culture and worldview. Basing on the ethnographic material collected in 2017–2020 and data from various sources, the author analyzes the current state of widespread phallic symbols, primarily in the folk environment, as well as behavioral norms, habits, customs associated with the phallus, many of which date back to the oldest, mainly ancient Greek phallic cults, which got a rebirth in the depths of the folk carnival culture of the Middle Ages. The wide prevalence of phallic themes and connotations in verbal language (exclamations, invectives, subcultural vocabulary, for example, gastronomic), in non-verbal means of communication (facial expressions, kinesics), iconography, artifacts, traditions, in everyday life is analyzed. The author comes to the conclusion that one can talk about the presence of a kind of phallicism in Sicily – an extremely important and widespread set of ideas, rituals and customs in local society, which flourishes despite the ethical norms of Catholicism. The bodily, corporeal representations and practices of Sicily, and primarily in the popular environment, are marked by the spirit of phallocentricity (Jacques Derrida’s term), patriarchy and gender dominance of men, and the phallus as a “sex sign” is surrounded by priority attention here.

The publication considers the plots and motives of Slavic legends, as well as beliefs about different parts of the human body. Particular attention is paid to those parts of the body that were added or, conversely, rejected in the process of human creation. In Slavic cosmogonic and etiological legends, there is a clear idea that the human body should correspond to the ideal conceived by the demiurge, that is why the cornea or body hair, tail are superfluous; genitalsadded to the original body are recognized as necessary. The main criterion for evaluating the human body is the norm, and bodily redundancy or insufficiency characterizes demonic beings.