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Emily Rogal Professor Abou Farman Farmaian Good Death, Bad Death 22 December 2015 Walking with the Walking Dead: Exploring the Construction of Personhood in Zombie

Narratives

On June 1st, 2012, ABC News posted an article on their website entitled, “Face­Eating

Cannibal Attack May Be Latest in String of ‘Bath Salts’ Incidents.” The article details the attack

earlier that year on May 26th, in which the “Miami police shot and killed [Randy Eugene], a

homeless man, who was allegedly feasting on the face of [Ronald Poppo], another homeless man

in a daylight attack on a busy highway…[Eugene] had ripped off his clothes and refused police

orders to stop eating [the man’s] flesh” (“Face­Eating Cannibal Attack May Be Latest in String

of ‘Bath Salts’ Incidents,” ABC News). In 2012, bath salts had been spoken of frequently in the

news due to it’s use as a drug. However, this incident gave rise to a whole new discourse

surrounding the substance, and the behaviors that people displayed when ingesting it. After this

event, which came to be known as the Miami cannibal attack, many sources began referring to

Eugene as a “zombie.” According to the American cultural narrative of a zombie, this attack did

meet the criteria of what makes a zombie. In her article entitled For the Ethical Treatment of

Zombies, Sarah Juliet Lauro defines the zombie at its’ core as “a body that has been stripped of a

person it once was, acting in a manner that is completely out of character, or seemingly devoid of

what we would call a soul” (Lauro, 9). According to this definition, the Miami cannibal attack

fits the qualifications of a zombie: a sentient human body transgresses by feasting on the flesh of

another human. This body, Eugene’s body, is seemingly devoid of all humanity, and cannot be

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shaken out of their trance. Additionally, Lauro discusses Daniel Alam, the plastic surgeon who

worked on the face of a Connecticut woman who was attacked by her pet chimpanzee in 2009.

Alman says, “What they all say is, ‘I’ve become a monster’...Because without a face, others

cannot see them as human. The world cannot relate to them ever again. That’s where the

depression comes in” (Lauro, 12). Lauro writes that “the transformation from human to monster

was not Eugene’s alone. He transmitted his non­human state Ronald Poppo when he destroyed

so much of his face. Therefore, in yet another chilling similarity to contemporary zombie

narratives, the nonhuman state was contagious, passed on by means of the bite” (Lauro, 12). The

ways in which the media adopted the word zombie to speak of this event causes us to ask the

question: what is it about the zombie that is so discursive? Many scholars and writers have

produced works inquiring into how the narrative of the zombie ­ found in historical fears,

cultural narratives, and fictional works ­ can help us to further understand our own modern day

society. In this paper, I will look at the ways in which the zombie has been reproduced in both

fiction and history by looking at the ways in which the zombie inhabits and represents our

deepest societal fears of transgressing social boundaries, undoing ritual responses to death, and

ultimately, becoming the reanimation of the dead. I will do this through first tracing the historical

fears of the undead, as well as the history of accounts of zombies, particularly in Haiti. Next, I

will look at a sampling of noted fictional works portraying zombies, and study the ways in which

they addressed relevant societal fears through their representation of the zombie. Through these

syntheses, I will look at the ways in which the zombie can help us in our modern day world

through understanding what constitutes a person, in particular through the lens of looking at

brain death, persistent vegetative state (PVS), and other ways in which we mark the boundaries

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of life and death, as well as person and non­personhood. The zombie is our modern day

conceptualization of a bad death. Through this, we can gain that all cultural perceptions of the

bad death inform the ways in which we view the bad life. In this paper, I will argue that the

zombie not only resembles our collective fears of a bad death, but ultimately reveals our fears of

living a bad life preceding the bad death.

Voudou and the Soul: Looking at the History of the Haitian Zombi

While the current incarnation of the zombie is mostly western centric, the historical basis

of the zombie can be traced back primarily to ideas found in the Voodou religion in Haiti. In

order to understand how the zombie, known in Voodou as the zombi, became a fixture of the

cultural narrative, it is first important to understand the religio­political climate and historical

context of Haiti, as well as Voodou. As a former French colony, “Haiti is a complex land of

synthesis and hybridity, a liminal space where Western Christianity fused (albeit irregularly)

with ancient African ritual and mysticism” (Bishop, 42). Therefore, thezombi is situated within a

religious context of liminality from the beginning, as it represents both the space between life

and death, as well as a creature born from the space in between the native views of spirituality in

Haiti mixed with Christianity. In his work on Voodou in Haiti in his bookPassage of Darkness:

The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, Wade Davis noted a few examples of important beliefs

in Haitian Voodou, including:

“the belief in a single greater god whose essence becomes manifest in a pantheon of spirits; the worship of these spirits through a song and dance ritual climaxing in spirit possession; a conviction that the souls of the dead are powerful and become more so through time; and the concept that the living must serve these dead through propitiatory rites involving gifts of food and animal sacrifices….and extensive use of folk narrative” (Davis, 30).

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The bokor in Voodou is a type of sorcerer who primarily deals in business relating to the soul.

According to the Voodou belief, everyone has two souls: the Gros Bon Ange and the Ti Bon

Ange, the “big good angel” and the “little good angel.” These souls function in different ways, as

“the Gros Bon Ange appears as a life force and corresponds roughly to the Christian soul,

whereas the Ti Bon Ange is perceived as a guardian soul representing the Western spirit”

(Ackermann and Gauthier, 468). It is through the capturing of one or both of these souls, as I will

explain in a later section, that the bokor is able to create a zombi. Because of this, there is also a

belief that “all humans have a zombi within themselves...specifically, one has both a zombi and a

spirit...like a soul” (Ackermann and Gauthier, 486). This is a stark difference to the narrative of

zombies we see in the west through horror films, where a zombie is a carrier of a disease that

makes them crave human flesh, and has a contagion level akin to that of a plague. Bishop writes

that this is the “most essential contrast between the living dead created by voodoo ritual and the

cannibalistic ghouls of the movie screen: In Haiti, the fear is not of being harmed by zombis; it is

fear of becoming one” (Bishop, 53). Therefore, because every person has the ability to become a

zombi, the as well as the fact that they are considered a factual part of society, the zombie as a

narrative inhabits different space in Haiti than in the United States.

How exactly does one become a zombi in Voodou? In order to answer this question, the

importance of medicine and remedies in Voodou must be established. In Haiti, the

conceptualization of health is extremely different from that in the West, where we are focused

mainly on a patient’s physical health and accept doctors and other medical professionals’ advice

at face value. Rather, the definition of health in Voodou is “a coherent state of equilibrium

between the physical and spiritual components of the individual [because] health is wholeness,

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which is conceived as something holy” (Davis, 43). Therefore, becoming a zombie requires one

part of a person’s health to be harmed, bringing about very real consequences. According to

anthropological accounts, there is not one way to make a zombie, but most Haitians who

subscribe to Voudou believe that some type of magical process is required. There are generally

two different types of zombies who are spoken of in the Voudou tradition: “one is a spirit, a part

of the Voudoun soul which has been sold to or captured by by a bokor and which, if released,

will be doomed to wander the earth until its’ destined time arrives to return to God,” while the

other type are “innocent victims raised in a comatose trance from their graves by malevolent

sorcerers” (Davis, 60). The first type of zombies are usually “carefully stored in jars,” while the

second type are, upon being risen, “led away under cover of night to distant farms or villages

where they must toil indefinitely as slaves” (Davis, 60). While this first type of zombi is kept as

an almost prize for the bokor, it is clear by the juxtaposition of the second type of zombi that is

used for manual labor, that a bodiless spirit is much less useful than a spiritless body. There are

several explanations without Haitian folklore as to how to make a zombi. However, many

anthropologists have focused on the usage of “symbolic powders,” also known as zombi

powders. Ackermann and Gauthier write:

“Haitian folk medicine is replete with symbolic powders and liquids. However, there are magical powders whose only use is malevolent. If they are deposited on the doorstep of the victim's house or with its belongings, this is called a coup de poudre, or "blow by powder." Ingredients are numerous and diverse, including, among others, powdered remains of snakes or toads and irritating plant products (it may be remembered that Haiti has no poisonous snakes). [These powders] are said to cause pulmonary edema, a lethargic state and possibly death. We suggest that the puffer fish is an ingredient of some zombi powders because it is known to be toxic, not because it induces some state of lethargy” (Ackermann and Gauthier, 499).

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In his field work in Haiti as a doctor during the AIDS crisis, Dr. Arthur Fournier cites one of his

patients, who explains to him that the “key to the zombie curse is tetrodotoxin, found in the skin

of puffer fish, abundant in the waters surrounding Haiti. It induces a state indistinguishable from

death” (Fournier, 34). Many different studies have been done on this toxin, as well as a 2010

Vice documentary, in recent years, but to study the science behind the powder is beyond the

scope of this paper. However, this idea leads us to ask the question, why would Voodouists want

to create a zombi? Furthermore, what sort of death is taking place with the zombi, since it is still

animated? One example could be relating to the ideas relating to the concept of social death.

Many of those who study the social death believe that “death in most non­western societies is not

seen as a single event, but as a process whereby the deceased is slowly transferred from the land

of the living to the land of the dead” (Sweeting and Gilhooly, 252). Sweeting and Gilhooly

describe this process as one that involves “rituals marking biological death, followed by rituals

of mourning, and then rituals of social death” (Sweeting and Gilhooly, 252). Therefore, social

death for these societies implies the final, most lasting type of death. However, Sweeting and

Gilhooly attribute the idea of social death to Sudnow, who they cite as defining social death as

“marked by that point at which a patient is treated essentially as a corpse, though perhaps still

clinically and biologically alive,” a time when “the institution loses its interest or concern for the

dying individual as a human being and treats him or her as a body as if he or or she were already

dead” (Sweetening and Gilhooly, 254). Therefore, the true way in which the Haitian zombi exists

within society is that it is socially dead, which contributes to its’ idea of being psychologically

and physically dead. It is important to keep in mind that when dealing with the zombie, “many

people living in Haiti do not consider the creation of a zombie...a matter of mythology or the

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thing of fairy tales; those who embrace the tenets of the Vodoun religion accept zombies as a

terrifying reality” (Bishop, 39). This is especially important to keep in mind when discussing

representations of the zombie in media, particularly through the genre of horror films.

Things That Go Bump in the Night: The Legacy of the Zombie in Western Horror

Films and Media

While the zombi began in Haitian and Voodou narratives, the zombie became a fixture in

the West, being represented in all different types of media portrayals. In particular, “since the

occupation of Haiti by the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century, the word

zombie has become a fixture in American culture...as a soulless corpse said to have been revived

by witchcraft’ or metaphorically describing ‘a dull, apathetic, or slow­witted person” (Bishop,

12). This definition of the zombie was built upon in every incarnation that it was present in, and

represented a myriad of societal fears regarding death and beyond that come up in these fictional

works. In this section, I will look at the various ways in which zombies have been represented in

western made horror films through looking in particular at Bela Lugosi’s White Zombie (1932),

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), as well as several more modern examples

such as AMC’s series, The Walking Dead.

The difference between works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s

Dracula, which are “looming vestiges of a waning past,” and the zombie, is the fact that the

zombie “at least in its most symbolic and suggestive versions is no longer ‘mere horror’ or ‘sick

fun’ alone, a place in which to watch the predations of the living dead from a position of entirely

theatrical safety” (Bishop, 2­4). This is evident first and foremost in Bela Lugosi’s 1932 film,

White Zombie. The film depicts Madeline, a New Yorker who is going to Haiti to marry her

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fiance in Port­au­Prince. Madeline and Beaumont, a man she encounters on the way over,

“witness a voodoo burial service at a crossroad...where they encounter Legendre with his zombie

entourage” (Williams, 18). Beaumont ends up falling in love with Madeline, and asks Legendre

the zombie (played by Bela Lugosi) to steal Madeline away from her beloved. Legendre ends up

turning Madeline into a “living zombie…[and] later, Legendre, Beaumont, and the zombie

bodyguard steal her body from Beaumont’s mausoleum” (Williams, 18). Neil, Madeline’s fiance,

“enlists the aid of Dr. Bruner, a missionary, to go to Legendre’s Castle, where they finally win

the contest of wills [and] Legendre’s zombie bodyguard perishes while the semi­alive Beaumont

kills Legendre, falling to a joint death upon the rocks beneath the Castle walls” (Williams, 18).

When he dies, Madeline is suddenly “freed from the contaminating forces of the Old World, [and

is] revived,” when Madeline and Neil are “reunited, free to return to the ‘innocent’ United States

they left” (Williams, 18). It is important to note that this film came out in 1932, a year which

Williams in his article describes as seeing “not only the worst of the Depression, but the greatest

production of thirties horror films” (Williams, 18). Additionally, the film’s setting is contextually

important, as we have already learned that, first and foremost, the zombie comes from Haitian

and voodou conceptualizations of the spaces between life and death. The ideas of voodou were

already on the American mind since the U.S.’s occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This

power dynamic of the colonizing American and the colonized Haitian emphasizes a “type of

Hegelian master/slave dialectic as well as the dominance of one culture (embodied in the voodoo

master) over another (that of the zombie slaves)” (Bishop, 65). Despite this, the film makes no

reference to the historical background of Haiti and the United States’ history, yet “the very

location used undermines the stereotyped functions the characters are supposed to play out on the

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film’s manifest level” (Williams, 19). During the U.S.’s occupation of Haiti, it is important to

note that the public’s attention was turned towards voodou, as the religion was relatively

unknown to the West. During this time, “stories of Voodoo circulated throughout the Americas

and Europe. Anxiety about Haiti in the United States translated into an anxiety about Voodoo,

which was increasingly linked to cannibalism in the U.S. popular press to underscore supposed

Haitian primitivism” (Kee, 9). Therefore, Voodou became increasingly represented as a symbol

of threats against the civilization of white, upper­middle class Americans. This trope was shown

in White Zombie through the Haitian zombie’s attack against Madeline, the American woman.

Legendre takes Madeline away from Neil, her American fiance, and in doing so, is threatening

her “good life,” or ending up marrying the American man. In his article looking atWhite Zombie,

Williams suggests that when Legendre the zombie takes Madeline away, there is a coded

element of sexual predatory behavior, in the fact that Madeline after being “thrust into a strange

environment of superstitious burial party, stereotyped frightened Negro coachman, Satanic

villain and zombies, Madeline feels sexually threatened by Legendre, who has taken her scarf

(later to be used for her transformation)” (Williams, 19). This representation of the zombie

hearkens back to the aforementioned idea that in Haiti, the fear is not of being hurt by the

zombies, but rather becoming one. Additionally, this brings up issues of white, western

masculinity, as “in genre terms, Neil is the hero…[it also] makes him part of the influx of U.S.

personnel which had disastrous effects on Haiti’s economic and social life” (Williams, 20). The

fact that Neil ultimately triumphs over the Haitian zombie speaks to the idea of needing to

replenish the strength of the American, white man in the middle of Depression era America. This

dominance, which threatened the very idea of what it meant to live a good life as a white man,

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was reasserted through these films that were essentially about triumphing over the weaker

masses. In discussing this, Bishop writes:

“For a Western, white audience, the real threat and source of terror in these early, voodoo­themed zombie films are not the political vagaries of postcolonial nations...but rather that the white protagonists ­ especially the female protagonist ­ might be turned into zombies themselves. In other words, the true horror in these movies lies in the prospect of a Westerner becoming dominated, subjugated, symbolically raped, and effectively ‘colonized’ by pagan representatives. This new fear ­ one larger than merely death itself ­ allowed the voodoo zombie to challenge the pantheon of cinematic monsters from Europe, becoming the first thoroughly postcolonial creature from the New World to appear in popular horror movies” (Bishop, 66).

In portraying the Haitian zombie as both a mindless, animalistic creature as well as a direct threat

to white masculinity and, moreover, the idea of a good life for this audience, White Zombie

effectively used the horror genre to create the bad death through the idea of being overtaken by

the foreign zombie.

in 1978, George Romero releasedNight of the Living Dead,a film that would completely

change the zombie film genre. The film depicts the experience of a group of people confined to a

farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, while their town becomes overtaken by flesh eating monsters

called zombies. Upon release, the film became a cult classic, and eventually made upwards of

$30 million at the box office. However, this iteration of the zombie was quite different from the

ones found in White Zombie. Bishop outlines that there are four ways in particular that these

monsters differ from previous iterations: “(1) they have no connection to voodoo magic, (2) they

far outnumber the human protagonists, (3) they eat human flesh, and (4) their condition is

contagious” (Bishop, 94). Romero’s film established the zombie as a carrier of a flesh eating

disease, and emphasized the impersonal mass of flesh that was a zombie. By emphasizing the

crowd factor of zombies, for example having the zombies work as a group to attempt to break

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into the farmhouse, Romero’s zombies emphasize not just the fear of the unknown other

impeding our good life, but the fact that large groups of them could come in an invasion of sorts.

In his work on the connection between displaced peoples and zombies, Jon Stratton notes that “in

many of the recent zombie texts, the zombie thread can be read in terms of the fears of many

members of Western countries about being overwhelmed by displaced people” (Stratton, 190).

Stratton argues that similarly to xenophobic discourse about anti­immigration, the essence of our

cultural fear of zombies is that “zombies do not have will but they are not in somebody’s

control...their existence is entirely alien...this is one way that the zombie as terrorist threat

functions” (Stratton, 192). Therefore, the zombie does becomes an even greater fear of the other,

as we have seen with the Haitian zombies in White Zombie, but continues through this new lens.

The film was released amidst critical response, as the “violence and grotesque images

were unprecedented at the time” (Bishop, 14). These images of “scenes of people’s entrails being

pulled out before their eyes, arms separated from torsos with the ease with which we rip into a

fresh baguette, and most of all...skulls split open in a myriad of ways” did not exist without a

political statement (Lauro, 7). These bloody images unsettled audiences, and Romero was

perfectly content with their reaction. The film was released just three years after the bloody

Vietnam War, and Romero had hoped that his “low­budget horror film [would] function as an

allegorical condemnation of the atrocities of Vietnam, violent racism, and the opposition to the

civil rights movement...Night of the Living Dead protested the war by graphically confronting

audiences with the horrors of death and dismemberment and by openly criticizing those who use

violence to solve their problems” (Bishop, 14). This particularly of note in a post­9/11 society,

where the news displays violent images that are as close to home as the eerily familiar empty

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suburbia of the zombie­apocalypse genre that is found in Night of the Living Dead and many

zombie movies since its release. Christie and Lauro remind us of this eerie familiarity, this

feeling of the zombie being too close for comfort, in describing the final scene of Night of the

Living Dead “where the bodies of the first zombies we saw on screen and the last human to

survive the night in the farmhouse are both shown being tossed into the fire by the sheriff and his

men” (Christie and Lauro, 62). We are meant to side with the humans through the night, to want

for them to survive. Showing the bodies of the almost survivor so close to the alien being who

has wreaked such havoc first calls for us to encounter our own mortality, to watch as the act of

attempting to survive the invasion fails.

Romero continues to play on our fears of the bad life leading to the bad death through the

trope of the zombie in his sequel to Night of the Living Dead,entitledDawn of the Dead(1978).

This film, as well as its 2004 remake, take place “primarily in shopping malls, locations that

afford both security and sustenance. At first, this doesn’t seem to be too bad of a set up.

However, the attitude quickly changes as the viewer watches as

“in the ’78 version, Romero presents a light­hearted montage showing the four remaining survivors playing basketball, eating exotic foods, and putting on make­up and expensive clothes—what horror scholar David J. Skal calls “consumerism gone mad.” ...In a sick way, the mall becomes the ultimate vacation resort. The guests just cannot go outside—ever.” (Bishop, 23­24)

Dawn of the Deadcontinued to push the boundaries as to what cultural fears were implicit within

the zombie. While the zombie in Night of the Living Dead represented the horrors that America

had inflicted upon Vietnam showing up at its’ own doorstep, Dawn of the Dead seemingly told

Americans that they, in fact, had been the zombies all along. The setting of the film primarily

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being a shopping mall acts as a “scathing cultural allegory, this time lampooning capitalism and

rampant consumerism” (Bishop, 14­15).

Since the release of Night of the Living Dead and the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, the

zombie has become a staple in pop culture through its’ various incarnations in the media. One

recent popular fictional work is AMC’sThe Walking Dead,a TV show which premiered in 2010

and followed the journeys of a group of humans seeking refuge during the zombie apocalypse,

led by a sheriff. The television show became widely popular, especially since the show displayed

gory scenes with zombies that had previously been restricted to just films. The zombie had been

reinvigorated in post­9/11 discourse, as previously shown. The series focuses exclusively on the

characters’ attempts to find safety, a complete turn away from the Haitian zombie that we first

encountered in White Zombie. In his article for The Atlantic from October 2015, Mike Mariana

writes:

“Hence a bitter irony between the Haitian zombie and its American counterpart. The monster once represented the real­life horrors of dehumanization; now it’s used as a way to fantasize about human beings whose every decision is exalted. While it’s difficult to begrudge the storytelling logic of wiping out the many to restore meaning and importance to the few, it’s still worth acknowledging the bleak asymmetry of the zombie then and the zombie now. The original emerged in a context where humans were denied control of their own bodies and sought death as an escape. And now in pop culture, the zombie has come to serve as the primary symbol of escapism itself—where the fictional enslavement of some provides a perverse kind of freedom for everyone else” (Mariani, The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies). This switch of the narrative of the zombie to being fully about the survivors who allude

them calls into question what exactly the zombie represents for us today. We have seen that

historically, our fictional depictions of zombies can relay to our fears of being overtaken by

capitalism, of the horrors we’ve inflicted in war turning up on our own porches, of the loss of

individualism. All of these themes relate to our concept of the bad life. Therefore, through

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understanding the current incarnation of the fictional zombie as the re­animated bad death, we

can understand how our society assigns value to certain lives over others.

Anyone in There?: The Zombie, Brain Death, and Persistent Vegetative State

Inherent within the narrative of the zombie is the idea of the non­zombie being put into

the position of looking at the zombie, and deciding whether or not they are human. Especially in

zombie films when the humans are attempting to get through a pack of zombies, they must

establish that these things are, in fact, zombies, so that they may kill them. This process becomes

complicated when one remembers that in most zombie films, the zombie is just an infected

person. When looking a zombie in the eye, you may see a friend, a mother, a brother. Bishop

cites this as a significant fear within the zombie genre, the idea that we could come upon the

“corpses of the known dead...dead kindred” (Bishop, 20). This is an interesting conundrum, the

idea that one needs to be in the position to look at their loved one, and decide whether or not

there are signs of life within them that should be protected. This trope, directly given to us by the

zombie film, calls into question our own modern day experiences with delineating life and death,

especially when considering ideas of how we relate to those who are presumed brain dead, or in

a persistent vegetative state (PVS). In this section, I will explore these phenomena in conjunction

with the zombie and the ways in which we decide who is living a “good enough” life to be able

to keep living.

In her work on how the nuances of brain death affect the process of organ transplants,

Margaret Lock explains that those who are brain dead “created by accidents and sustained by

medical technology” (Lock, 2). Lock explains that many of these patients were put into to brain

death by some sort of blunt trauma to the head, and “are kept alive by a relatively simple piece of

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technology ­ the artificial ventilator” (Lock, 1). This machine essentially performs bodily

functions for the body which it cannot provide on its own, such as breathing. Often times, brain

death brings up complicated decisions for doctors and families alike. The problem becomes,

according to the new definition of death by many doctors, which is that “death is encapsulated in

the moment when the brain becomes irreversibly damaged” (Lock, 366). Other signs of brain

death include:

“Clinical signs of brain death about which there is virtually unanimous agreement are as follows: There should be no response to pain stimuli (such as pinpricks to the hands and feet, hard pressures on the fingernails, or very hard pressure on the sternum), nor evidence of brainstem reflexes: the pupils should be dilated and not contract in response to light; when the head is moved from side to side, the eyes should stay fixed in a midline position as the head rotates, indicating no control of the eye muscles; the the patient should not gag or cough when stimulated, nor respond to cold water being poured into the ear” (Lock, 236­237).

It is of importance to note that many of these symptoms can be traced back to various devices

found in zombie films, such as the zombies eyes seeming dark and devoid of life, as well as

seemingly being unable to respond. This is where the true fear of both the zombie and brain

death meet: the idea that someone we love is still alive in one sense, but is completely out of our

reach to communicate with, making them something that is almost less than human.

New language surrounding these ideas began to make their way into common vernacular,

ideas such as “pulling the plug,” or removing the life sustaining technologies, became

synonymous with killing or allowing someone to pass on. Brain death brought with it an entirely

new idea of death, that someone could be precariously balanced between life and death. In doing

this, an entirely new definition of death needed to be dealt with, and “professional consensus has

been lacking as to whether death is a moment or a process and how to best discern when it

occurs” (Lock, 7). Even today, there is “no consensus...as to whether a definition of death should

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be applicable to all living forms, or whether there can be a death unique to humans” (Lock, 7).

For many cultures in non­western societies, the death of brain is not the equivalent to the death

of the person. This nuance makes it even more difficult to establish a cross cultural definition of

death, let alone a definition of death that encompasses all of humanity.

Similar to brain death is the idea of PVS, or persistent vegetative state which is “the

result of trauma or degenerative disease” (Kaufman, 69). Kaufman discusses those living in a

persistent vegetative state against the “death with dignity discourse,” which is “so dominant now

in American life...that largely advocates for ‘natural’ death, that is, death without artificial

prolongation through technological support or other medical interventions” (Kaufman, 74). This

issue has brought up ideas of hospice and other out of hospital care for patients. However, the

idea of a death with dignity brings up ideas of what it means to live a life with dignity. Are only

those who are living a dignified life considered to be allowed to live? Is someone who is brain

dead truly alive in any capacity? In order to dig deeper into this question, we need to look at how

both brain death and PVS relate to ideas of personhood.

Lock tells us that “only if the idea of the ‘person’ is clearly defined to mind and brain can

the destruction of the brain be equated with the death of an individual…[but], if the concept of

the ‘person’ is diffused throughout the body, or even extends outside the body, then destruction

of the brain is not easily reckoned as signifying death” (Lock, 8). Locating the locus of self

within the body is a difficult task, and ultimately brings up ideas of who is deemed a person. In

looking at ideas of personhood, we can uncover whether or not a person who is brain dead, and

ultimately the zombie trope, are true candidates for our ideas of personhood. In their article,

Personhood and Neuroscience: Naturalizing or Nihilating?,Farah and Heberlein explain that the

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ways in which we define personhood have a strong connection to the ways in which different

ethical systems are formed. For example, “persons, and other things, are generally held

responsible for their actions, and can thus deserve credit or blame...the same is not true for a

non­person. For example, if a falling tree kills someone, we do not regard the branch or its

behavior as morally wrong” (Farah and Heberlein, 38). Therefore, in addition to the definition of

a person being someone who is autonomous and able to perform bodily functions on their own,

the ability to distinguish right from wrong is also important when discussing personhood. If a

person is not an individually acting moral agent, can we see them as a person? These questions

lead us to ask if the ways in which we view the body of a person who is brain dead, and the ways

in which we view the zombie standing before us, wanting to rip our very flesh from the bone, are

not so different in the end.

Putting the Zombie to Rest

The zombie inhabits a space within our cultural narrative that for many reasons, other

supernatural creatures have not been able to do. The zombie forces us to come to terms with

questions of when a body is dead, and when death is not a one hundred percent completed

process. The zombie represents our own deepest fears of the threat of the bad death waiting for

us, but more over, the fear that we are presently leading a bad life. In both its cultural and

historical narrative, the zombie has represented a myriad of different societal fears. The zombie

draws people in from all areas of the academy who are wondering what it is about the flesh

eating creature that attracts our attention, yet repulses us so much. While many have linked the

resurgence of the zombie apocalypse in films and other media portrayals to events such as the

fall of the Berlin Wall and the 9/11 attacks, but “apocalypticism has always been ingrained into

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the archetypal psyche of any society defining itself” (Dendle, 54). While this is true, I believe

that the zombie offers something to the cultural psyche that no other supernatural creature in the

media can give us. The zombie as a trope comments on the Western fear of a world that is not

Western controlled, of the dead not staying dead, of the lives we lead ultimately resulting in a

loss of dignity and ending in a bad death. Zombies allows us to comment on current medical

predicaments of whether those who are brain dead are truly dead, and ultimately allow us to

think about the ways in which we both view and recognize another body as a person. As we

continue to explore the ways in which to both stave off death and die in new, creative ways, such

as technologies that allow someone to be frozen and hopefully later resurrected (cryogenics) or

even transhumanist ideas of uploading one’s consciousness, we will continue to see the zombie

in our films, our television shows, and on the front page of our newspapers. As society continues

to push these questions of death, personhood, and dignity, the zombie will continue on.

Rogal 19

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