About This Project

This project will draw on anthropological and ethnographic methods to collect data on the black magic rites of the Bizango cults, whose devotees are the direct descendants of the very slave ancestors who brought magic of zombificasyon to Haiti over 250 years ago. I intend to demonstrate that the zombi concept, and the beliefs and rites surrounding it, are of far greater cultural significance to the Vodouist than simply serving as a poison process.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

There is a dearth of anthropological study of Haitian Vodou and the zombi, and what there is of any substance is variously antiquated (e.g., Hurston 1938; Métraux 1959; Courlander 1960), cursory (Desmangles 1992; Bellgarde-Smith & Michel 2006), or sensationalist (Seabrook 1929; Williams 1932). The last researcher to study the zombi was Dr. W. Davis in the early 80s, who described a pharmacological poison process. His work has been criticized as “arrogant and aggravating” (Corbett 1990), “without factual foundation” (Kao & Yasumoto 1986), fraught with “major problems with using appropriate sources in his arguments” (Lawless 1989) and “assertions [that] are bunk and methods unscientific” (Booth 1988), and “a carefully planned, premeditated case of scientific fraud” (Kao 1989).

What is the significance of this project?

This project will deploy sound, ethnographic methodologies in order to advance a new hypothesis concerning the zombi of Vodou. After 23 years of prior field research in Haiti, I argue that the zombi rites and the beliefs surrounding them, carry a far deeper cultural meaning for Haitians than simply an ethnopharmacological poison process. My prior research (National Geographic Society, 2017) has found that "zombi poisons" exist, but are peddled by fraudulent malfacteurs and are outright lethal concoctions that fail to bring on the state of apparent death claimed by Davis (1985). I argue that the zombi rather serves as a powerful means of social control in the Haitian interior, where there are no agents or adjunct of social control save that provided by the framework of Vodou.

What are the goals of the project?

The specific goals of this project are threefold:

1. to document and record the oral tradition and folklore concerning the zombi in and around Lakou Soukri;

2. to observe, describe and document the rites of zombificasyon as they are conducted in the temple at Soukri and among the bush priests of the Bizango cult near Leogane; and,

3. to use this project as the preliminary, foundational research upon which a later, longitudinal study of black magic (including zombificasyon) for inclusion in my forthcoming next book on Vodou in Haiti.