ANTHR 3045 - The Anthropology of Zombies

(CA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

C. Uran.

While zombies have existed at some level of reality for centuries, it was not until the 20th Century that zombies overran the global popular imagination. Because of their origins at the many points of collision between colonizer and colonized, zombies have always walked the uncertain spaces between binary “certainties” such as us and them, rich and poor, slave and master, and, of course, alive and dead. As those spaces of uncertainty have been foreclosed upon through globalization, zombies became symbolically flexible and strategic syntheses across these binaries. Thus, zombies occupy a variety of liminal spaces wherein contemporary social tensions are reflected and refracted.