Zombies in the Haiti Culture
In the last two decades, zombies have gained popularity in the Western world, becoming a metaphor for persons who lack consciousness and threaten social structures. Many other parts of the world have accepted this kind of thinking. There are, however, a few differences with regards to the treatment of the figure -- in terms of zombification and the wider inferences to bias inherent in the practice. Even though zombies have been the subject of various studies, they have not been investigated with regards to their mythological contributions. Many mythological studies have focused on Greek texts and other texts that have greatly influenced the modern Western world ideology, which is why research into Haiti's zombie myth was quite unlikely (Thomas, 2010).
The Haitian Zombies
The zombie phenomenon surfaced in Haiti in the late 1800s. Zombification practices would later find expression in discussions linked to compromised biases that emerged from slavery and imperialism. Zombies soon transcended the discourse between the individual and the collective as the post-slave narrative paid little attention to the individual compared to the naturally developed collective dynamic. The zombie figure implied that with no identification to a collective group no individuality, uniqueness or even consciousness....
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