Exhibition at musée du quai Branly addresses the zombification associated with the Haitian voodoo religion
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Exhibition at musée du quai Branly addresses the zombification associated with the Haitian voodoo religion
Congo packet, before 1973, Haiti © musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, photo Claude Germain.



PARIS.- At the crossroads of the world of the living and the dead, the zombie has strongly influenced global popular culture and fantasy cinema. It initially comes from a complex syncretism, linked to the colonisation of Haiti and the transatlantic slave routes which, from the 16th century, brought together magical and religious practices and beliefs from sub-Saharan Africa, elements of Roman Catholicism and indigenous Caribbean knowledge associated with the mastery of natural drugs.


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The exhibition addresses the zombification associated with the Haitian voodoo religion, in which an individual who had committed a misdeed would be judged, condemned, drugged, buried alive, exhumed then exiled and transformed into a slave under the supervision of a master (bokor).

Featuring objects linked to the zombification ritual, a reconstructed voodoo temple and cemetery, and an "army of Bizango warriors", Zombies. Death is not the End ? challenges a polymorphous anthropological reality, between knowledge and fiction.

Zombies, the undead of Haitian voodoo

According to tradition and in their "classic" sense, zombies are individuals who are judged by secret Haitian voodoo societies because they persist in committing misdeeds (assassinations, murders, thefts, rapes, inheritance theft). As human justice (ordinary courts) proved impotent against the risks to the living community, these individuals would be summoned seven times in a row before the mystical courts of secret societies (Champ'well, Cochon Gris, Cochon Marron and above all Bizango), then condemned if they persevered in their conduct. After being drugged and put in a state of apparent death using poisons of plant or animal origin, the condemned would be buried alive and conscious, then exhumed the following night; they would then be transported to the other side of the island and transformed into slaves to serve a master (the bokor). Zombification is therefore considered a punishment worse than death.

Other types of "criminal" zombies would become zombies directly, through the actions of wizards, without receiving judgment. There are also "psychiatric" zombies, suffering solely from a medical pathology, and "social" zombies, for whom zombification is a metaphor for identity theft.

Part 1 of the exhibition presents the fundamental elements of Haitian voodoo: its general codes, the organisation of gods and worship, rituals around the dead and deities linked to death (Ioas), in particular Baron Samedi and Grande Brigitte. There are recreations of an "army of Bizango warriors" (a group of some 20 "fetish" dolls from the Bizango secret society taking part in the trial of the accused), a life-size voodoo temple and a cemetery. A large collection of evil charms (ouangas), from the collections of the Laboratoire Anthropologie Archéologie Biologie (Université de Saint Quentin en Yvelines), is also placed in context.

The origins of zombies

The practice of zombification in Haiti lies at the convergence of three phenomena: the religions of sub-Saharan Africa (in particular witchcraft practices aimed at harming victims at a distance); the slave routes on which beliefs and cultures from three continents came together; and the command of poisons and narcotic substances of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean arc (Arawak, Taino, Carib). In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the etymology of the word zombi refers to the ghost of a dead child. Many sub-Saharan African religions consider wandering souls and dead bodies as realities. These supernatural entities, and the practices associated with them, are evoked in Part 2 of the exhibition by several objects from the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac collection, including interlocking sculptures and spell repelling mirrors.

The Roman Catholicism imported by the colonisers, through slavery and the slave trade, became integrated into the civilisations of sub-Saharan Africa, particularly during the weeks of the ocean crossing and through religious conversions. Catholic pious images originally from Italy and Cuba, like the cross motif, are a constant feature of voodoo temples and offerings.

To this syncretism are added the rites of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean arc, represented in the exhibition by Taino objects.

The globalisation of the zombie phenomenon

The word 'zombi' first appeared in European literature in 1690, in Le zombi du grand Pérou ou la Comtesse de Cocagne by Pierre Corneille de Blessebois.

However, this figure was soon supplanted by entities closer to the Western world (vampires, ghosts), before being rediscovered and revived by ethnologists, notably at the beginning of the 20th century, during the American occupation of Haiti. Popular culture quickly appropriated the figure of the zombie, far removed from any anthropological reality, and turned it into a frightening figure, a symbol of contagious death.

The globalised zombie therefore escaped Haitian voodoo culture, as shown in films (Night of the Living Dead, 1968; World War Z, 2023), TV series (Walking Dead, 2010), songs (Michael Jackson's Thriller; The Cranberries' Zombie ), comic strips, video games and events such as Zombie Walks. At the end of the exhibition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), based on the work of Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis and Haitian biochemist Max Beauvoir, illustrates the revival of the Haitian zombie: the ultimate return to its roots, or a new Haitian-American syncretism?


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