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 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
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.
1
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 (19151934). 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) 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.
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic & Science in the Modern World (New York:
Oxford, 2004),149.
3
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 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.
__________________________
See Styers, chapters 3 and 4 for a history of the development of this Manichaean narrative
of science versus the magico-religious.
4
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
5
For example, McAlister (2002).
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 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
6
Mary F.A. Tench, “West Indian Folklore,” Folklore 25, No. 3 (1914): 370-371.
Tench, 371.
8 Ibid., 93. Italics in original.
9 Seabrook, 93.
7
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
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
10
11
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 103.
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 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 qualities – the psychiatric ward in
Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002), 143.
12
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 midcentury. 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 HurstonMars 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
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 9-10.
13
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
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
Wade Davis, The Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (Chapel Hill:
UNC Press, 1988), 1.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 2.
14
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 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
Davis 1988, 2. Italics mine.
Ibid.
20 Ibid., 3.
21 Melville Herskovitz, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938) 246.
18
19
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
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
Alfred Metreaux (New York: Shocken, 1972) 281.
Ibid.
24 Davis, 1988. 3.
25 Davis 1988, 3.
26 Styers, 50.
27 Davis 1988. 3.
22
23
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 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 example, Davis reminds the reader that the same
poison (TTX) is sometimes accidentally consumed when eating pufferfish. Rather than
28
29
Davis 1988, 181.
Ibid.
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 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
Ibid., 182.
Ibid., 183.
32 Davis 1988, 183.
33 Ibid., 182.
30
31
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 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:
Ibid., 287.
Ibid.
36 Davis 1988, 181.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 182.
34
35
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 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.
Ibid., 183.
Davis 1988, 183.
41 Ibid., 182.
42 Ibid., 287.
43 Ibid.
39
40
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:
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
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.
45 Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 265.
44
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 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
Davis 1985, 129.
Ibid., 91.
48 Ibid., 157.
49 Ibid., 169.
46
47
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 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 culturallybounded 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 Davis will never make a zonbi, but he has arguably made many zombies
since 1985 -- Rudy Eugene being one.
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-couldactually-happen_p2.html
51 Deleuze and Guattari, 9-10.
50