Zombie

This article is about the figure from Haitian religion. For the figure from films such as "Night of the Living Dead", see Zombie (fictional). For the philosophical concept, see Philosophical zombie. For other uses, see Zombie (disambiguation).

Zombie (Haitian Creole: zonbi; North Mbundu: nzumbe) is a term used to denote an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means such as witchcraft.^[1] The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli. Since the late 19th century, zombies have acquired notable popularity, especially in North American and European folklore.

In modern times, the term "zombie" has been applied to an undead race in horror fiction, largely drawn from George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.^[2] They have appeared as plot devices in various books, films and in television shows.

West African Vodun

According to the tenets of Vodou, a dead person can be revived by a bokor, or sorcerer. Zombies remain under the control of the bokor since they have no will of their own. "Zombi" is also another name of the Vodou snake lwa Damballah Wedo, of Niger–Congo origin; it is akin to the Kikongo word nzambi, which means "god". There also exists within the West African Vodun tradition the zombi astral, which is a part of the human soul that is captured by a bokor and used to enhance the bokor's power. The zombi astral is typically kept inside a bottle which the bokor can sell to clients for luck, healing or business success. It is believed that after a time God will take the soul back and so the zombi is a temporary spiritual entity.^[3] It is also said in vodou legend, that feeding a zombie salt will make it return to the grave.

Haitian Vodou and alleged pharmaceutical explanation

In 1937, while researching folklore in Haiti, Zora Neale Hurston encountered the case of a woman who appeared in a village, and a family claimed she was Felicia Felix-Mentor, a relative who had died and been buried in 1907 at the age of 29. Hurston pursued rumors that the affected persons were given a powerful psychoactive drug, but she was unable to locate individuals willing to offer much information. She wrote:

“

What is more, if science ever gets to the bottom of Voodoo in Haiti and Africa, it will be found that some important medical secrets, still unknown to medical science, give it its power, rather than gestures of ceremony.[4]

”

Several decades later, Wade Davis, a Harvard ethnobotanist, presented a pharmacological case for zombies in two books, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (1988). Davis traveled to Haiti in 1982 and, as a result of his investigations, claimed that a living person can be turned into a zombie by two special powders being entered into the blood stream (usually via a wound). The first, coup de poudre (French: 'powder strike'), includes tetrodotoxin (TTX), a powerful and frequently fatal neurotoxin found in the flesh of the pufferfish (order Tetraodontidae). The second powder consists of dissociative drugs such as datura. Together, these powders were said to induce a death-like state in which the will of the victim would be entirely subjected to that of the bokor. Davis also popularized the story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was claimed to have succumbed to this practice.

The process described by Davis was an initial state of death-like suspended animation, followed by re-awakening—typically after being buried—into a psychotic state. The psychosis induced by the drug and psychological trauma was hypothesised by Davis to re-inforce culturally-learned beliefs and to cause the individual to reconstruct their identity as that of a zombie, since they "knew" they were dead, and had no other role to play in the Haitian society. Societal reinforcement of the belief was hypothesized by Davis to confirm for the zombie individual the zombie state, and such individuals were known to hang around in graveyards, exhibiting attitudes of low affect.

Davis' claim has been criticized, particularly the suggestion that Haitian witch doctors can keep “zombies” in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years.^[5] Symptoms of TTX poisoning range from numbness and nausea to paralysis (particularly of the muscles of the diaphragm), unconsciousness, and death, but do not include a stiffened gait or a death-like trance. According to psychologist Terence Hines, the scientific community dismisses tetrodotoxin as the cause of this state, and Davis' assessment of the nature of the reports of Haitian zombies is viewed as overly credulous.^[6]

Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing highlighted the link between social and cultural expectations and compulsion, in the context of schizophrenia and other mental illness, suggesting that schizogenesis may account for some of the psychological aspects of zombification.^[7]

South Africa

In some South African communities it is believed that a dead person can be turned into a zombie by a small child.^[8] It is said that the spell can be broken by a powerful enough sangoma.^[9]

In popular culture

See also: Zombie (fictional)

The figure of the zombie has appeared several times in fantasy themed fiction and entertainment, as early as the 1929 novel The Magic Island by William Seabrook. Time claimed that the book "introduced 'zombi' into U.S. speech".^[10] In 1932, Victor Halperin directed White Zombie, a horror film starring Bela Lugosi. This film, capitalizing on the same voodoo zombie themes as Seabrook's book of three years prior, is often regarded as the first legitimate zombie film ever made, and introduced the word "zombie" to the wider world.^[11] Other zombie-themed films include Val Lewton's I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow, (1988) a heavily fictionalized account of Wade Davis' book.

A new version of the zombie, distinct from that described in Haitian religion, has also emerged in popular culture in recent decades. This "zombie" is taken largely from George A. Romero's seminal film The Night of the Living Dead, which was in turn partly inspired by Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend.^[12] The word zombie is not used in Night of the Living Dead itself, but was applied later by fans.^[13] The monsters in the film and its sequels, such as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, as well as its many inspired works, such as Return of the Living Dead and Zombie Flesh Eaters, are usually hungry for human flesh although Return of the Living Dead introduced the popular concept of zombies eating brains. Sometimes they are victims of a fictional pandemic illness causing the dead to reanimate or the living to behave this way, but often no cause is given in the story. Although this modern monster bears some superficial resemblance to the Haitian zombie tradition, its links to such folklore are unclear,^[12] and many consider George A. Romero to be the progenitor of this creature.^[14] Zombie fiction is now a sizeable sub-genre of horror, usually describing a breakdown of civilization occurring when most of the population become flesh-eating zombies – a zombie apocalypse.

See also

• Anchimayen
• Draugr
• Dybbuk
• Frankenstein
• Ghoul
• Golem
• Hoodoo
• Jiang Shi
• Mind control
• Undead
• Zombie ants
• Zombie apocalypse
• Zombie Squad

References

1. ^ "Zombie". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 1998. 
2. ^ Smith, Neil (March 7, 2008). "Zombie maestro lays down the lore". London: BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7280793.stm. Retrieved 2009-10-01. 
3. ^ *McAlister, Elizabeth. 1995.“A Sorcerer's Bottle: The Visual Art of Magic in Haiti.” In Donald J. Cosentino, ed., Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995: 304–321.”
4. ^ Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. 2nd Ed. (1942: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, p. 205). 
5. ^ Booth, W. (1988), “Voodoo Science”, Science, 240: 274–277.
6. ^ Hines, Terence; "Zombies and Tetrodotoxin"; Skeptical Inquirer; May/June 2008; Volume 32, Issue 3; Pages 60–62.
7. ^ Oswald, Hans Peter (2009 (84 pages)). Vodoo. BoD – Books on Demand. p. 39. ISBN 3837059049. 
8. ^ Marinovich, Greg; Silva Joao (2000). The Bang-Bang Club Snapshots from a Hidden War. William Heinemann. p. 84. ISBN 0434007331. 
9. ^ Marinovich, Greg; Silva Joao (2000). The Bang-Bang Club Snapshots from a Hidden War. William Heinemann. p. 98. ISBN 0434007331. 
10. ^ "Mumble-Jumble", Time, 9 September 1940.
11. ^ Roberts, Lee. "White Zombie is regarded as the first zombie film", November 2006.
12. ^ ^{a b} Jasie Stokes. "Ghouls, Hell and Transcendence: the Zombie in Popular Culture". Bringham YOung University. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd3501.pdf. Retrieved 2011-10=02. 
13. ^ "‘Godfather of the Dead’ George A. Romero Talks Zombies". wired.com. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/06/george-a-romero-zombies/. Retrieved 2011-10-02. 
14. ^ Deborah Christie, Sarah Juliet Lauro, ed (2011). Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. Fordham Univ Press. p. 169. ISBN 0823234479, 9780823234479. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0oZIlm84F2oC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=romero+zombie+ghouls&source=bl&ots=OqDhPx6I3m&sig=fBKmtkH_PBGVm7rpADZ0bwR3_lI&hl=en&ei=SpuITqGXF8TI0QWFk4XlDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=romero%20&f=false. 

Further reading

• Ackermann, Hans-W.; Gauthier, Jeanine (1991). "The Ways and Nature of the Zombi". The Journal of American Folklore 104 (414): 466–494. doi:10.2307/541551. JSTOR 541551.  edit
• Bishop, Kyle William (2010) American Zombie Gothic: The rise and fall (and rise) of the walking dead in popular culture McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, ISBN 978-0-7864-4806-7
• Black, J. Anderson (2000) The Dead Walk Noir Publishing, Hereford, Herefordshire, ISBN 0-9536564-2-X
• Curran, Bob (2006) Encyclopedia of the Undead: A field guide to creatures that cannot rest in peace New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, ISBN 1-56414-841-6
• Davis, E. Wade (1983). "The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombi". Journal of Ethnopharmacology 9 (1): 85–104. doi:10.1016/0378-8741(83)90029-6. PMID 6668953.  edit
• Davis, Wade (1988) Passage of Darkness: The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, ISBN 0-8078-1776-7
• Dendle, Peter (2001) The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, ISBN 0-7864-0859-6
• Flint, David (2008) Zombie Holocaust: How the living dead devoured pop culture Plexus, London, ISBN 978-0-85965-397-8
• Forget, Thomas (2007) Introducing Zombies Rosen Publishing, New York, ISBN 1-4042-0852-6; (juvenile)
• Graves, Zachary (2010) Zombies: The complete guide to the world of the living dead Sphere, London, ISBN 978-1-84744-415-8
• Littlewood, Roland; Douyon, Chavannes (1997). "Clinical findings in three cases of zombification". The Lancet 350: 1094–6. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(97)04449-8.  edit
• McIntosh, Shawn and Leverette, Marc (editors) (2008) Zombie Culture: Autopsies of the Living Dead Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, ISBN 0-8108-6043-0
• Moreman, Christopher M., and Cory James Rushton (editors) (2011) "Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-5911-7.
• Russell, Jamie (2005) Book of the dead: the complete history of zombie cinema FAB, Godalming, England, ISBN 1-903254-33-7
• Waller, Gregory A. (2010) Living and the undead: slaying vampires, exterminating zombies University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Indiana, ISBN 978-0-252-07772-2

External links

• Discussion of zombies in film at NPR's On The Media
• Centers of Disease Control and Prevention discuss Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse