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.