Abstract
Drawing on the cultural theory of risk, this chapter discusses the cultural incentives of risk perception and response in the perspectives of individuality and collectivism. The research compares interview data of Chinese and foreign citizens and primary studies of Western European and American citizens on the mask-wearing practice. It points out that mask wearing is respectively regarded as protection and individual responsibility by the Chinese interviewees, and as concealment and individual choice by their Euro-American counterparts. The different viewpoints reflect varied understanding of individual body politics and of social organization and groupness. The perspectives of individuality and collectivism decisively shape people’s ideas of good citizenship, leading to different response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The chapter thus proposes how public health policy-making can attend to people’s particular sociocultural mapping of risk so as to be culturally sensitive and socially effective.
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Funding
This research is supported in part by UIC Research Grant (R202048), Guangdong University Innovation and Enhancement Project “Synergy between cultural mechanism and risk governance from the perspective of urban-rural comparison” (R5202004), and The Joint Research Project of Guangdong Philosophy and Social Science Foundation “Coordination mechanism between ‘risk adaptation’ and social development in the post-epidemic era” (R202116).
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Zhang, Q., Wang, Y. (2023). Body Politics and the Collective Well-Being: A Comparative Study of the Cultural Motives of Mask Wearing During COVID-19. In: Zhao, S.X.B., Chan, K.T., Çolakoğlu, S., Zhang, Q., Yan, B. (eds) Comparative Studies on Pandemic Control Policies and the Resilience of Society. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9993-2_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9993-2_12
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