Need something properly academic

[beccaelizabeth]

The most irritating thing in doing essays is having to find something proper Cultural Studies degree academic to cite to show things you already know are still true outside your own head.

I need something about zombies. At the moment I have the first few minutes of Sean of the Dead, the GURPS Undead RPG sourcebook, and a vague memory of reading a thing on the internet about a time zombies in Haiti turned out to be mentally ill people.

Any suggestions?

I googled for the Haiti thing and found a bunch of paywalls.
Littlewood, R., & Douyon, C. (1997). Clinical findings in three cases of zombification. Lancet, 350(9084), 1094-1096.

and a popular science article about the Lancet thing
http://mindhacks.com/2012/01/11/a-medical-study-of-the-haitian-zombie/

But on the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.

[... tetrodotoxin theory, neurotoxin maaaaaaybe could induce those symptoms...]

But more probable is that most cases are mistaken identification of wandering mentally ill or neurologically impaired strangers by bereaved relatives.

They noted “People with a chronic schizophrenic illness, brain damage, or learning disability are not uncommonly met with wandering in Haiti, and they would be particularly likely to be identified as lacking volition and memory which are characteristics of a zombi.”

Interestingly, the first known photograph of a zombie, shown above, was taken by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and reproduced in her 1938 book Voodoo Gods where it notes that the subject was photographed in a psychiatric hospital, which makes more sense in light of this more recent medical examination.

Following links from mindhack found a pdf that actually opened
http://www.who.int/mental_health/emergencies/culture_mental_health_haiti_eng.pdf
World Health Organization/PAHO. (2010). Culture and Mental Health in Haiti: A Literature Review. Geneva: WHO.
page 13

Because the subject of zombies has been appropriated and sensationalized by Western
popular culture and films, it is important to understand the meaning of zombification in
the Haitian context. The primary purpose of zombification is to obtain labor, specifically
arduous agricultural labor, harkening back to Haiti’s heritage of plantation slavery. The
zombie is “nothing more than a body deprived of its conscious powers of cerebration…
moral judgment, deliberation and self-control” (Deren, 1983, p. 42-43). Littlewood and
Douyon (1997) studied three cases of purported zombification and found they involved
individuals with intellectual disability or severe mental disorder who were misidentified
as being a lost or deceased family member

The mindhack write up on 1997 says two out of three were misidentified, but says how all three died, which leaves a very big question about the third. Not that being mistaken for dead is as rare as one might wish. I collect stories on that for Highlander purposes, and they keep on happening, usually involving drugs and/or hypothermia.




Teacher barely glanced at my Zombies Life Writing story and said I should make it clearer that it's about childhood fears. It's not. As a child I didn't get around to worrying I'd be mistaken for a zombie due to mental illness, or reduced to the functional level of one due to meds. Fear of mentally ill people and people acting like zombies because of drugs or alcohol is a longer standing problem, one that gets expressed through zombies because it feels creepy to worry that much about a category of humans I should be judging individually, and because some of said zombies were close enough to home I really didn't want to be thinking on the problem. Epic scale fears of the rise of consumerism as reflected in the endless hunger of the modern movie zombie are a bit meta for a child, as is fear of work reducing you to empty mindless routine, though that one goes right back to the roots of the zombie myth. Zombies are a really powerful metaphor both in their culture of origin and in current pop culture, and sometimes it's a lot quicker and easier to say 'zombies in the hall' than it is to explain in detail what the problem is.

Teacher is worried my zombies aren't going to fit the criteria of Life Writing.
Her life obviously has different vocabulary than mine. And fewer zombies.