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The Zombie that Science Built: How Bodiless Souls Became Soulless Bodies and Invaded American Roadways
Rudy Eugene, the man that was shot by police on a Miami causeway
last summer for attempting to eat the face of a homeless man, was quickly
dubbed “The Miami Zombie” by news outlets. Although there was initial
speculation that he was under the influence of bath salts, the “new LSD”, a
subsequent toxicology report showed only the presence of marijuana.1 The
Miami Zombie’s girlfriend, however, provided her own explanation for his
terrifying behavior –he was “under a Voodoo curse.”2 Her ascription of his
behavior to “Voodoo” was no doubt inspired by his Haitian origins, but it also
reveals the traces of a peculiar history of zombies in America. That Rudy
Eugene should have been called “the Miami Zombie” rather than simply “the
Miami Cannibal” or “the Miami Madman” demonstrates the salience of this
particular zombie variety in the popular American imagination. But, at the
same time, his girlfriend’s remarks suggest that the memory of the zombie’s
origins remains. Even so, the Miami Zombie is a strange hybrid of zombies
old and new (zonbis and zombies), made up of elements drawn from different
moments in America’s nearly century-long fascination with the zombie. Once
limited to the winding footpaths of the Haitian countryside, the zombie has
become a global figure, menacing our modern highways. Once emblematic of
the persistent primitivism and superstition of Africans in the “New World,” the
zombie has become a universal scientific possibility. Once referring primarily
to the spirits of the recently dead (as we will see), the zombie has become a
1 Brad Lendon, “Reports: Miami ‘zombie’ attacker may have been using ‘bath salts,” This Just In: CNN’s New Blog, entry posted May 29, 2012, http://news.blogs.cnn.com /2012/05/29/reports-miami-zombie-attacker-may-have-been-using-bath-salts.2 “Miami ‘zombie’ attack due to voodoo curse girlfriend says,” MSN Now, entry posted May 31, 2012, http://now.msn.com/miami-zombie-attack-due-to-voodoo-curse-girlfriend-says.
body overtaken by the ravenous desire for human flesh. The so-called “Miami
Zombie” is then a mixture of the old and the new; he bore in himself specific
cultural and geographic origins while also displaying the zombie’s newly
acquired traits and universal potentiality. The once culturally-bounded
zombie has gone global.
What is not immediately clear is how the figure of the “zombie”
became so salient a monster as to displace those of a more refined and
European pedigree (like Frankenstein’s monster or the vampire).
Furthermore, how has this specific cultural-religious entity, the zonbi (in
Haitian Kreyòl), acquired these new attributes (cannibalism, insanity)? What
processes transformed it into the “zombie” (the popular Hollywood variety)?
How has it become a genuine and widespread anxiety in the West? This
paper will suggest that the answer to these questions is intimately tied to the
intervention of so-called “Western science,” which began most explicitly near
the end of the US Occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Additionally, it will argue
that the figure of the zonbi/zombie is an illuminating example of the
interaction and confrontation between what are popularly conceived as
radically opposed modes of thought – that of “science” on the one hand and
primitive thinking (the magico-religious) on the other. The popular
triumphalist view of Western science has long held that one of its primary
functions is to serve as a force for disenchantment and the extirpation of
superstition.3 This is achieved through the scientist’s commitment to
empiricism, rationality, and the proper ascription of causation. Whereas the
Haitian peasant identifies a zonbi as the creation of a bokò (a Vodou priest)
3 Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic & Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford, 2004),149.
who is “working with the left hand” (i.e. engaged in malevolent magic), the
scientist is assumed to determine the actual causes that produce what is
named as zonbi. While the peasant’s ascription is considered superstition, the
scientist’s is explanation.
The interaction and confrontation of these two modes of thought is
illuminating, however, precisely because it disrupts some of this deeply
bifurcated description.4 Far from rescuing enlightened Westerners from the
creations of primitive religious belief or superstition, the recent history of
scientific interest in the Haitian zonbi reveals instead the power of science to
produce its own monsters in its search for proper causation. In this history, as
this paper will illustrate, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and ethnobotanists
serve as real-life Dr. Frankensteins whose ascriptions of causation create the
new monster -- a new source of fear -- even as they seek to offer explanation.
Furthermore, this history suggests that rather than a difference between
ascribing proper or improper causation, which is fundamentally a value claim
and thus multiply contingent, the more important difference between the
Vodouisant and the anthropologist or ethnobotanist is one of scale. We will
see that the abstracting and typifying logic that motivates Harvard’s “Zombie
Project” as carried out in Wade Davis will be consistently frustrated by the
Haitian zonbi’s resistance to abstraction. We see this in the words of Davis’s
informant who claims that, Haiti will offer Davis the chemical concoction that
he seeks, but it will never yield “the magic” required to use it.
This apparent failure of science to reduce the zonbi to its psychoactive
chemical components, however, does not mean that Americans will never
4 See Styers, chapters 3 and 4 for a history of the development of this Manichaean narrative of science versus the magico-religious.
have their own zombies. For, in fact, the abstracting and typifying logics of
the anthropologist, psychologist and ethnobotanist succeed in making a new,
distinctly American zonbi – the zombie. Having dismantled the zonbi so as to
make it available to a scientific taxonomy, the zombie is reconstituted as a
universal human possibility, a decidedly translocal phenomenon, capable of
altering human life on an apocalyptic scale.
__________________________
The etymological origins of the word zonbi have been debated for more than
a century. Some have suggested that the word comes from the French
ombres meaning “shadows”, others linked it to West Indian terms like jumbie,
meaning “ghost” or zemis which referred to souls of the dead. Most recent
scholarship has sought the word’s origins in the African languages of either
Bonda (in which zumbi = cadavre) or Kongo (in which nzambi = spirits of the
dead). Given the Dahomean, and thus Kongo, origins of much of Haiti’s
population, theses final suggestions seem perhaps most convincing.
However, as with so many parts of Haitian culture and language, it wouldn’t
be inadvisable to imagine the word as an amalgam or several, or at least
bearing multiple resonances.
The difficulty in determining the proper derivation of the word was mirrored
early on by confusion in description. Much of this confusion came from the
existence of what now appears to be two kinds of zonbi in the speech and
thought worlds of Vodou. One zonbi, the zonbi astral, is a bodiless soul. These
are spirits of the recently dead that can be captured or purchased and put to
spiritual or mundane work. The resemblance between zonbi astral and the
Kongo nzambi has led some to consider this the most original or at least the
primary sense of zonbi in Haiti.5 The second is the zonbi kadav (Fr. zombi
cadavre), which is a soulless body. This is the zonbi with material form, and
as we will see, it is the only possible zonbi for scientific inquiry. Consequently,
this zonbi, while perhaps a more recent version, is by far the most well-known
and popularized zonbi. It is the zonbi kadav that will pass through U.S.
immigration and find its way onto Miami’s causeways, though not without
first acquiring some new monstrous qualities.
Early folklorists have provided what appear to be the earliest accounts
of Haiti’s zonbi. One of the earliest examples comes from Mary F.A. Tench,
who claimed that the zombi “has a trace of the vampire about it, and
probably its nearest parallel is the Irish Love Spectre.”6 Still, in the second
half of her description appears a semblance of the zonbi astral. She writes,
“Fortunately, it [the zonbi] sometimes appears as a small creature which can
be trapped [in bottles], not killed, but henceforth in service of its captor.”7
This version of the zonbi -- the one that could be bought and sold in bottles,
used for protection, healing, or for evil – was quickly overshadowed by
William B. Seabrook’s more grotesque and horrifying account of his
encounter with zonbi kadav.
Published in 1929, W.B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island attempts to
demonstrate that “Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alive religion”.
Throughout his descriptions of Vodou, in what appears to be an effort to lend
Vodou every available measure of legitimacy as a religion, Seabrook makes
5 For example, McAlister (2002).6 Mary F.A. Tench, “West Indian Folklore,” Folklore 25, No. 3 (1914): 370-371.7 Tench, 371.
constant comparisons and appeals to West African religion. There was one
figure in Haitian Vodou, however, that Seabrook could not comprehend
because he could not link it to an African cultural past – the zonbi. Upon
learning about the many creatures of Haiti including the zonbi, he remarked
to his informant, “It seems to me that these werewolves and vampires are
first cousins to those we have at home, but I have never, except in Haiti,
heard of anything like zombies.”8 This creature, for Seabrook, seemed
“exclusively local.”9 After listening to the remarkable stories of his informant,
Polynice, about zonbis working at HASCO (Haitian-American Sugar Company),
Seabrook himself was led to meet a group of zonbis working in the fields.
There, though he normally had a stomach for almost anything (even for
human flesh), he claims to have nearly panicked. He wrote:
“The eyes were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in
truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused,
unseeing. The whole face, for that matter was bad enough […] I had
seen so much previously in Haiti that was outside ordinary normal
experience that for the flash of a second I had a sickening, almost
panicky lapse in which I thought, or rather felt, ‘Great God, maybe this
stuff is really true, and if it is true, it is rather awful, for it upsets
everything.’ By ‘everything’ I meant the natural fixed laws and
processes on which all modern human thought and actions are
based.”10
8 Ibid., 93. Italics in original.9 Seabrook, 93.10 Ibid., 101.
It is here, in the final years of the US Occupation, during a period of
increasing industrialization and what many Haitians viewed as a re-
enslavement, that Western science encounters face to face a new puzzle.
Seabrook himself was certainly not a highly committed rationalist or an
empiricist. Yet, this radical cultural relativist cannot help but appeal to “the
natural fixed laws and processes” that the zonbi threatened to upend. Having
been thoroughly shaken by his encounter with the zonbis in the field,
Seabrook visits Dr. Antoine Villiers, a Haitian physician, in an effort to
stabilize his thinking with a dose of Western science. Despite the fact that Dr.
Villiers claimed to disbelieve the resurrection of any and all dead, including
Jesus, he cannot refute the existence of the zonbi. Instead, he takes down a
book from his shelf, the Code Pénal of Haiti, and points to Article 249, which
categorizes as murder the use of any substance that induces a coma or
lethargic state causing one to appear as dead.11
Dr. Villiers, while not refuting the existence of the zonbi, offers
Seabrook a clue to establishing “proper” causation, and it is apparently
enough to reassert the sovereignty of the “natural fixed laws” over this
apparent anomaly, the sovereignty of the modern over the primitive. More
importantly, Seabrook’s encounters with the zonbis in the field and the
medical doctor in his office at once introduced American audiences to the
zonbi kadav and provided a clue that initiated Harvard University’s “Zombie
Project” and the work of Wade Davis on its behalf. Science had found its
zonbi and so too had Hollywood. In 1932, only shortly after the release of The
Magic Island, The White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi hit cinemas. It depicted 11 Ibid., 103.
a Vodou sorcerer and factory owner who raised the dead to life to work in his
factory – an obvious retelling of Seabrook’s account of HASCO. Several other
similar films followed in the coming decades. The two projects sprang from
the same source and would remain tightly bound – scientists would seek to
explain away the (now only) corporeal zonbi and Hollywood would as quickly
translate the zonbi into an ever-more monstrous source of fear. As scientific
explanations of the zonbi shifted, so would Hollywood’s “zombie” acquire new
attributes and come to represent new and increasingly universal threats to
human existence.
The effort to materialize the zombie in America off-screen also began
with Seabrook, however. The clue given by Dr. Villiers of a “substance that
induces coma or lethargic state” offered the assurance that the zonbi, like all
things, could be broken down to its core constituents, its proper cause, and
thereby reproduced. In his study of the Amazonian riverscape, Hugh Raffles
describes the work of entomologist Henry Walter Bates as “[breaking] down
the specimen into the definitive morphological elements through which it
would reveal its secrets…only then, in the act of being successfully
catalogued, did it become loosened from its relationship to local practice.”12 A
similar scientific logic is at work with the “zonbiologists” that follow Seabrook.
For the zonbi to move from the Haitian footpaths to the causeways of Miami
would require just such a breaking down and loosening.
One of the zonbi’s stop along its path is particularly important for
understanding the American’s zombie’s madness and its other monstrous
12 Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 143.
qualities – the psychiatric ward in Port-au-Prince. I only have time today to
briefly attend to this important exchange between Zora Neale Hurston and
one of Haiti’s scientific elite – Dr. Louis P. Mars – but I believe I have time to
gesture to its significance. One of the most alluring chapters of Hurston’s
1938 Tell My Horse is the chapter on zombies. Here, she describes her
encounter with a zombie at the Psychiatric Institute, and she even includes a
black and white photograph of Felicia Felix-Mentor, with her dusty hair
cropped short and her tattered clothes staring blankly at the camera. What
made Felicia different from other mentally ill patients was that her death had
been recorded in 1907, but she had reappeared in 1936 unable to speak or
otherwise demonstrate mental clarity. For her part, Hurston defines the
Haitian zombie as “bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were
dead, and after that they were called back to life again.”
Unsurprisingly, the authenticity of the case did not go uncontested. Dr.
Louis P. Mars, who trained in medicine and psychiatry at Columbia University
and later became dean of the Medical School at the University of Haiti (and
was also the son of Protestant Haitian Aristocrats!) offered the most public
critique of Hurston’s account in a short article he published called “The Story
of the Haitian zombie.” Mars brings back into view the dual nature of the
zombie, describing it as (1) referring first to the spirit of a dead person who
died without having a Vodou spirit attached to his/her head and (2) referring
to an entity which a wealthy farmer may have working for him. Regarding
Hurston’s account, he wrote: “Evidently she got her information from the
simple village folk and did not go beyond the mass hysteria to verify her
information, nor in any way attempt to make a scientific explanation of the
case.” He offers his own double-psychological explanation in which belief in
the zombie is the result of mass-hysteria on the part of the people and
mental illness on the part of the so-called zonbi.
There are two things to notice here: Firstly, the appearance of the word
“explanation” and its attachment only to certain kinds of discourse, that is
the current “scientific discourse”. Secondly, we should notice the ascription
of mental illness to the zonbi. From Dr. Mars’ perspective, it is little surprise
that Hurston found her zonbi in the psychiatric ward, and Hurston herself is
implicated in the mass hysteria that propagates the myth of the zonbi. There
are also reasons why we shouldn’t be surprised, however – reasons that point
towards the entangled fields of power that characterize zonbi science in the
mid-century. Michel Foucault might have argued that, whatever the zonbi is,
from the perspective of the state the zonbi is fundamentally a monster. “The
monster,” Foucault writes, “combines the impossible and the forbidden.” It is,
in both the “juridical and scientific tradition,” fundamentally a mixture – a
mixture of two realms, two species, or even “a mixture of life and death.” The
monster is born out of transgression. In the modern age, zonbis and other
monsters like masturbators, pederasts, cannibals, and witches are precisely
the kinds of deviants that come under the care of medical science as the
“mentally ill.”
Hurston’s psychiatric ward zonbi is a crucial moment in this history. It
indicates a move from the fields to the clinic, from anthropology’s fieldwork
to psychiatry’s clinical work. It is also here that the zombie may pick up some
of its other deviant qualities. The soulless bodies who labored quietly in the
fields and stared blankly back at the anthropologist were becoming cannibals
and madmen, ravenous brain-eating killers. In this way, the Hurston-Mars
debate also reveals the zonbi’s resistance to abstraction and its future lines
of flight.13
There is, however, another stop on the zonbi’s journey to the Miami
causeway – Harvard’s Zombie Project. "The Zombie Project began in the
spring of 1982,” Wade Davis recounts in the opening pages of The Passage of
Darkness, “when the Botanical Museum at Harvard was contacted by the late
Nathan S. Kline.”14 Nathan Kline had helped to establish the Centre de
Psychiatrie et Neurologie Mars-Kline, named for himself and none other than
the late Louis P. Mars. With the help of McGill-trained Haitian psychiatrist
Lamarque Douyon, Kline had spent years researching every popular report of
the appearance of zonbis. Now, one particular story caught their attention
(and even the attention of the BBC) – the story of Clarvius Narcisse. Clairvius
Narcisse had died in 1962 at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital. Then, in 1980, a
man who claimed to be the very same Narcisse returned to his home village
and presented himself to his family members, claiming to have been made a
zonbi eighteen years earlier by his brother due to a land dispute.15 What
made this case of particular interest, of course, was the nature of the
institution that recorded his death. The Albert Schweitzer Hospital was “an
American-directed philanthropic institution that maintains precise and
accurate records."16 In other words, his death had been verified by an
13 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), 9-10.14 Wade Davis, The Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1988), 1.15 Ibid.16 Ibid.
approved arm of Western science, rather than by the unreliable expertise of
local Haitian officials. Still, Kline and Douyon subjected the case to further
scrutiny by developing a detailed and thorough questionnaire concerning
“intimate aspects of the family past.”17 Narcisse answered all of these
questions correctly. They even enlisted the forensic expertise of Scotland
Yard to match his fingerprints with those of the once dead Narcisse. His story,
therefore, was a special one. Both his death and his reappearance had
survived the initial scrutiny of science.
Such scrutiny, however, marks only the beginning of the investigation, for
Seabrook’s fixed natural laws remain inviolable, and the zonbi demands an
explanation. As Davis tells us, “If the case of Clairvius Narcisse was to be
believed, there had to be a material explanation.”18 Despite the grammatical
construction, the word “material” here is not merely adjectival. Rather, it
functions synonymously with the word that follows. After all, Narcisse himself
had already offered an explanation – he was made a zonbi by his brother over
a land dispute presumably by the left-handed workings of some Vodou priest
for hire. In contrast, a material cause – some biological agent either
introduced into the brain or native to the deviant brain – is understood to be
necessarily present.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Davis and his medical team propose to focus
their attention on the “possible existence of a folk toxin which had long been
rumored to be involved in the process of zombification.”19 Davis was
referring, of course, to the clue provided to Seabrook fifty years earlier in
17 Ibid., 2.18 Davis 1988, 2. Italics mine.19 Ibid.
Haiti’s Penal Code. This long-rumored folk toxin had made occasional
appearances in anthropological texts including that of Hurston who concluded
her chapter with this suggestion. Davis, however, tries to distance himself
from the work of the anthropologists, suggesting that, “anthropologists on
the whole had perfunctorily dismissed the phenomenon as superstition.”20
Davis does not specify, however, to whom he refers. Certainly Seabrook and
Hurston took seriously Haiti’s zonbis. In fact, they were both profoundly
disturbed by their own first-hand experiences. He could not have been
referring to Herskovitz, who described at length the various kinds of dead
that appear in Haitian Vodou. Despite what he considered an exaggerated
account of the zonbi by Seabrook, Herskovitz affirmed their very real
presence in Haiti, writing, “Though the concept [of the zonbi] has been
presented in recent years with unjustifiable sensationalism to the reading
public, it is indisputably a living one."21 Surely Davis was not referring to
Alfred Metreaux, who described zonbis as “people whose decease has been
duly recorded, and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few
years later living with a boko in a state verging on idiocy.”22 Like Seabrook
and Hurston, Metreaux also referred to the peculiar article from the Penal
Code.23 It is not clear why Davis so dismisses the work of anthropologists if
not simply to grant his own work special status as serious scientific
investigation. He must discount the work of anthropologist as “a glaring
absence of serious academic research” to make room for his own which will
“prove once and for all whether zombies of any form were to be found in
20 Ibid., 3.21 Melville Herskovitz, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938) 246.22 Alfred Metreaux (New York: Shocken, 1972) 281. 23 Ibid.
Haiti."24 In this phrase, despite its being accompanied by the language of
certitude (“prove once and for all”), Davis exhibits a lack of clarity about what
he hopes to prove. It ought to have been clear enough by 1982 that zonbis of
some form were undoubtedly present in Haiti. Instead, when Davis writes
“zombies of any form,” he means “zombies of a particular materially
explainable form.” Part of his aim was to make a material explanation appear
as the only possible explanation.
As far as Davis and his associates were concerned, the only possible
material explanation had to be the rumored “folk toxin.” In their view, the
discovery of the toxin was crucial to solving the “zombie problem,” for
“without it, one was obliged to consider the phenomenon as magical belief,
the Narcisse case itself a fraud.”25 Davis here reiterates a distinction between
science and magic based largely upon a materialist-mechanistic view of the
“natural world” that remains influential today.26 The absence of material
cause would leave magic as the only recourse, which would be no recourse at
all.
Davis describes the initial phase of his research in explicitly scientific
language. He begins with the formulation of an hypothesis born out of careful
research in the “ethnopharmacological literature.”27 He hypothesized the
existence of a folk toxin that contained one or more psychtropic plant-based
substances that would effectively slow a person’s metabolic and limbic
processes to the point of the appearance of death. Once pronounced dead
and buried, the body would be exhumed. Finally, the zonbi was placed in the
24 Davis, 1988. 3.25 Davis 1988, 3.26 Styers, 50.27 Davis 1988. 3.
service of its maker and held captive either due to incumbent brain damage
from lack of oxygen or given an antidote and then continually drugged to
keep it in a “zonbi” state. This hypothesis was then tested through fieldwork
in Haiti with the help of local experts and informants. Upon finding a local
bokò willing to prepare the concoction for Davis, he lists ad nauseam the
scientific names of plant species, their psychotropic properties, and their
precise quantities in the preparation. Davis even sends particularly promising
samples to be tested in Harvard laboratories to confirm both his
identifications of the contained substances and their psychotropic properties.
Though most of the substances prove to be “inert,” a few of his samples
contained substances which, in an hypothetically “right” quantity, could
produce the desired results. In this sense, Davis declares his scientific
investigation a success. He was tasked with finding a material explanation,
and he found one – teterodoxin (TTX).
The remainder of Davis’ overtly academic account attends to the
necessary “other” ingredient for the making of a zonbi -- the social world of
Haitian Vodou. The “social” functions for Davis as simply another necessary
ingredient for activating the true power of the psychotropic substance. In a
chapter titled, “Nothing is Poison, Everything is Poison: The Emic View,” Davis
reminds his reader that, “any psychoactive drug – remembering that the
difference between a hallucinogen, a medicine, and a poison is often a matter
merely of dosage – has within it a completely ambivalent potential.”28 The
“condition” produced is only the “raw material” that is either activated or not
by the particular cultural or psychological forces at play.29 In Japan, for
28 Davis 1988, 181.29 Ibid.
example, Davis reminds the reader that the same poison (TTX) is sometimes
accidentally consumed when eating pufferfish. Rather than becoming zonbis,
however, the unfortunate man or woman is simply a victim of poisoning.30
Thus, the second ingredient for the making of zonbis is simply the “culture”
of Haitian Vodou with its attendant expectations and psychological
conditions. Still, these two ingredients are available only through different
modes of research – attention to different interpretations. Davis summarizes
his position as follows:
I argue that, to the Vodounist, a zombie of the spirit (zombi astral, zombi ti
bon ange) and a zombie of the flesh (zombi corps cadavre) are equally
real entities, but that for the latter to exist, one must seek an etic, or in
this case pharmacological, explanation.31
It is important, Davis writes, to understand both the emic and the etic
interpretations of a phenomenon like the Haitian zonbi, but it is equally
important not to confuse the two.32 To confuse the two, for Davis, would be to
confuse to fundamentally different modes of thought. “What distinguishes
scientific thinking from that of traditional and nonliterate cultures,” he writes,
“is the tendency of the latter to seek the most direct means to achieve total
understanding of the world.”33 Davis’s comparison subtly reveals the cultural
elitism that he works hard to combat elsewhere in the book. The comparison
he makes is between scientific thinking and traditional cultures. The
30 Ibid., 182.31 Ibid., 183.32 Davis 1988, 183.33 Ibid., 182.
difference, one might assume, is as much a difference between science and
tradition as it is between “thinking” and “culture.” Davis’ characterization of
“traditional culture” is one that might be equally made of the totalizing
claims of scientific explanation. Davis’s characterization of scientific thinking,
however, is quite different. His is one of humility. Rather than reducing the
process of zombification to a single pharmacological constituent, Davis claims
to have explained the phenomenon through the connections between
pharmacology, spiritual belief, and psychological predisposition.34 Yet, in the
very next paragraph, Davis claims also to have “demystif[ied] one of the
most exploited of folk beliefs.”35 This version of science makes dual claims to
humility and non-reduction even as it claims to have fully explained and
demystified.
The remainder of Davis’ overtly academic account attends to the
necessary “other” ingredient for the making of a zonbi -- the social world of
Haitian Vodou. The “social” functions for Davis as simply another necessary
ingredient for activating the true power of the psychotropic substance. In a
chapter titled, “Nothing is Poison, Everything is Poison: The Emic View,” Davis
reminds his reader that, “any psychoactive drug – remembering that the
difference between a hallucinogen, a medicine, and a poison is often a matter
merely of dosage – has within it a completely ambivalent potential.”36 The
“condition” produced is only the “raw material” that is either activated or not
by the particular cultural or psychological forces at play.37 In Japan, for
example, Davis reminds the reader that the same poison (TTX) is sometimes
34 Ibid., 287.35 Ibid.36 Davis 1988, 181.37 Ibid.
accidentally consumed when eating pufferfish. Rather than becoming zonbis,
however, the unfortunate man or woman is simply a victim of poisoning.38
Thus, the second ingredient for the making of zonbis is simply the “culture”
of Haitian Vodou with its attendant expectations and psychological
conditions. Still, these two ingredients are available only through different
modes of research – attention to different interpretations. Davis summarizes
his position as follows:
I argue that, to the Vodounist, a zombie of the spirit (zombi astral, zombi ti
bon ange) and a zombie of the flesh (zombi corps cadavre) are equally
real entities, but that for the latter to exist, one must seek an etic, or in
this case pharmacological, explanation.39
It is important, Davis writes, to understand both the emic and the etic
interpretations of a phenomenon like the Haitian zonbi, but it is equally
important not to confuse the two.40 To confuse the two, for Davis, would be to
confuse to fundamentally different modes of thought. “What distinguishes
scientific thinking from that of traditional and nonliterate cultures,” he writes,
“is the tendency of the latter to seek the most direct means to achieve total
understanding of the world.”41 Davis’s comparison subtly reveals the cultural
elitism that he works hard to combat elsewhere in the book. The comparison
he makes is between scientific thinking and traditional cultures. The
difference, one might assume, is as much a difference between science and
38 Ibid., 182.39 Ibid., 183.40 Davis 1988, 183.41 Ibid., 182.
tradition as it is between “thinking” and “culture.” Davis’ characterization of
“traditional culture” is one that might be equally made of the totalizing
claims of scientific explanation. Davis’s characterization of scientific thinking,
however, is quite different. His is one of humility. Rather than reducing the
process of zombification to a single pharmacological constituent, Davis claims
to have explained the phenomenon through the connections between
pharmacology, spiritual belief, and psychological predisposition.42 Yet, in the
very next paragraph, Davis claims also to have “demystif[ied] one of the
most exploited of folk beliefs.”43 This version of science makes dual claims to
humility and non-reduction even as it claims to have fully explained and
demystified.
But Davis was not always, or perhaps was never, as confident in his
demystification as all of this suggests. The Passage of Darkness was, after all,
his second telling of this story. His first account, The Serpent and the
Rainbow, offers a somewhat different account of his research. It was precisely
because this version received less than favorable critical reviews from many
of his scientific peers that he wrote the second, more data-driven account.44
In this earlier account, while he still claims to have been successful in finding
the pharmacological basis of zombification, it appears as a success in a very
restricted sense.
Throughout, Davis seems consistently frustrated by his limitations as a
cultural “outsider.” At one point, Davis writes:
42 Ibid., 287.43 Ibid.44 See David Inglis’s “From Myth to Reality: Wade Davis, Academic Scandal, and the Limits of the Real” in Scripted, 7:2 (August 2010) for an account of its reception.
I had arrived in Haiti to investigate zombis. A poison had been found and
identified, and a substance had been indicated that was chemically
capable of maintaining a person so poisoned in a zombie state. Yet as a
Western scientist seeking a folk preparation I had found myself swept into
a complex worldview utterly different from my own and one that left me
demonstrating less the chemical basis of a popular belief than the
psychological and cultural foundations of a chemical event.45
What he described as merely a necessary consideration for understanding
the chemical basis of zombification in The Passage of Darkness appears in
this earlier version as the very “foundations” of a chemical event. Here
“culture” is not opposed to “thinking” and neither is it joined to “tradition.”
Rather, culture is the inescapable environment of this and every
phenomenon, and Davis appears less confident in his ability to fully
understand or demystify. He describes his uncertainty even as laboratory
results came back on the sample that he sent demonstrating
pharmacologically active compounds that rapidly lower the metabolic rate of
living organisms. “Even as I received congratulatory letter and calls from
Kline and Lehman,” Davis writes, “I was more deeply perplexed than ever […]
Now I had to face just how little I understood about a phenomenon that
suddenly appeared hauntingly real.”46
This earlier account also lays bare the complexity of authorship and
the ambivalence of motive that seems hidden in The Passage of Darkness.
His initial attempts to obtain a “real” zonbi powder were countless times
45 Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 265.46 Davis 1985, 129.
thwarted by his “local expert,” Marcel, who offered several “fraudulent”
powders (meaning they contained no pharmacologically active ingredients).
Only after Davis reveals to Marcel that he stands to make “thousands of
dollars from us in the future” does Davis acquire an active powder.47 “The
blancs [whites] are blind,” one informant said, “except for zombis – you see
them everywhere.” Davis replied, “Zombis are a door to other knowledge.”48
The demystification that seemed so central to Davis’ scientific account of his
research is here nowhere to be found. Instead, Davis’ understands his work
as primarily the extraction of local knowledge – knowledge that is not his
own, knowledge that can be bought. Even when bought, Davis admits the
partial nature of this knowledge. As the words of his informant reveal, Davis
can leave with all the powders he can buy, but he will “never make a
zombie,” nor “leave [Haiti] with the magic.”49 The magic that Davis will later
discount as a non-explanation here symbolizes the elusive key, the ultimate
cause, of the Haitian zonbi.
The rhetorical shifts that a comparison of these two accounts reveals is
rather helpful for closing the gap between Davis and his experts and
informants. Both, of course, have come by experience to recognize the reality
of the Haitian zonbi. Both equally recognize that a zonbi is made and that
certain forces are necessary for its making. What is first needed is a material
substance, which Davis calls a psychotropic chemical teterodoxin and the
bokò calls a potion. For both, this material substance is incapable of
producing a zonbi without another non-material component, which Davis calls
47 Ibid., 91.48 Ibid., 157.49 Ibid., 169.
culture and the bokò calls magic. There may appear to be a basic
epistemological gap remaining, for the bokò attributes this non-material force
to the geographically specific forces of Vodou cosmology. But, even this gap
vanishes upon analysis, for Davis also admits the geographic specificity of
this non-material component when he puzzles over the lack of Japanese
zonbis despite the presence of the same neurotoxin. It is only through the
laborious language of data (scientific names, quantities) and the rigorous
policing of the lines of interiority and exteriority (emic and etic) that Davis is
able to prop open the tenuous gap. Furthermore, it is only by maintaining the
gap that Davis feels he can recover his credibility.
Conclusion: We Will Always Make Zombies
While it is perhaps debatable to what extent Davis has ever recovered
his credibility in scholarly circles, the force of his zonbi “facts” are
indisputable in popular culture. In a recent online variety magazine article
titled “Five Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen,”
TE Sloth and David Wong list brain parasites, viruses, neurogenesis,
nanobots, and neurotoxins as scientifically possible causes of zombification.
In support of this final suggestion, they write:
This stuff has happened in Haiti; that's where the word "zombie" comes
from. There are books about it, the most famous ones by Dr. Wade
Davis (Passage of Darkness and The Serpent and the Rainbow). Yes,
the movie The Serpent and the Rainbow was based on this guy's actual
science stuff.50
Here we see that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, even as lines of flight
connect a thing with new multiplicities, they also loop back through new lines
to reconnect with original territories.51 The Miami Zombie, while perhaps
unrecognizable to a Haitian bokò, is nonetheless connected to the Haitian
zonbi, and this connection is wrought through the wildly generative powers of
science to do far more than it claims or imagines. The explanatory power of
zonbi science, which operates through its claim to ascribe proper causation,
is not socially benign. The virtue of the magical explanation was its culturally-
bounded quality. Without the magic, there could be no zonbi. The threat of
the zonbi, which is more precisely the threat of zonbification, was contained
and predictable. But, this is to say nothing of zombies and zombification. As
Davis admits in 1985 and conceals in 1988, the reductive work of the
scientist is certainly not total. It is, however, inarguably powerful by
permitting extraction and abstraction. While Davis may not have left with the
bokò’s magic, he left with different, but equally productive sort of magic –
that of a chemical explanation that has made zombification a universal
human possibility. The concrete causeways are now as likely a setting as the
dirty footpaths of the Haitian countryside for encountering a zombie. Perhaps
50 TE Sloth and David Wong, “Five Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen,” Cracked Magazine, entry posted on October 29, 2007, http://www.cracked.com/article_15643_5-scientific-reasons-zombie-apocalypse-could-actually-happen_p2.html51 Deleuze and Guattari, 9-10.
Davis will never make a zonbi, but he has arguably made many zombies
since 1985 -- Rudy Eugene being one.