General Information
The word zombie refers to the “living dead” and originally derives from Central Africa. In Kongo, the cadaver or spirit of a deceased person is called nzambi. But the belief in the existence of the “living dead” is widespread, and the term has also been subject to much cross-cultural appropriation, decontextualization, and recontextualization.
Popular discourses associate zombies with the Caribbean Voodoo religion. For example, Haitians believe that malevolent sorcerers sometimes gain control of the bodies of their victims by robbing them of the component of the soul that contains personality, character, and willpower (tibon ange ) or by raising them from their graves. The sorcerers then lead their innocent victims in a comatose trance, under cover of night, to distant places where they must toil indefinitely as slaves. The Haitian conception has informed the image of zombies in massmediated popular culture as the macabre figure of a corpse in tattered rags, entirely subservient and beholden to the authority of some unknown master. Zombies are portrayed as docile, with glassy empty eyes, and as being without will, memory, and emotion.
A controversial theory by ethnobiologist Wade Davis (1988) suggests that there may well be an ethnobiological basis for reports of the zombie phenomenon in Haiti. He refers to a case of zombification that was verified by a team of physicians. In 1962 Clairvus Narcisse was pronounced dead at a hospital, and buried eight hours later. But Clairvus reappeared in 1980, claiming that his brother had made him a zombie because of a land dispute. Davis argues that Clairvus was mistakenly diagnosed as dead, buried alive, and taken from the grave. Clairvus claimed that following his resurrection from the grave, he was forced to work as a slave with other zombies. He escaped after two years and spent the next sixteen years wandering about the country, fearful of his vengeful brother. Among the various preparations used by Haitian sorcerers, Davis identified a fish containing tetrodotoxin, an extremely potent neurotoxin that induces a complete state of peripheral paralysis and imperceptibly low metabolic levels. Davis postulates that the Haitian belief in zombies could be based on rare instances where an individual receives the correct dosage of the poison and is misdiagnosed as dead. Davis describes zombification as a form of punishment imposed by Bizango secret societies. These societies are arbiters of social life, protect community resources such as land, and use poison and sorcery as weapons.
Via Enclyopedia.com