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Where do zombies come from?
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Zombies Gaining Popularity
Zombies, a staple of pop culture horror, first started appearing in novels and pulp magazines in the 20s, finally debuting on celluloid in 1932 with the movie White Zombie, though many att...
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The Origin Of The Zombie Folklore
The word ‘Zombie’ is derived from West African languages, with the Mitsogo language of Gabon describing them as ‘ndzumbi’, which means a corpse, to the Kongo language usin...
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Zombies From The Caribbean Region
- The Caribbean and its surrounding areas carried a large number of slaves, transporting them across the Atlantic, for making them work in farming. This created a mix of religions and infused ...
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Searching For The Real Zombies
The earliest writers of zombie tales like the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and occultist William Seabrook claim to have seen actual zombies and do not consider it a primitive superstition or folklor...
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Zombie Craze as Medium and a Message
- As a medium, zombies can be used as a comparison and an example to better discuss concerns and problems in the community.
- It could also serve as a message to promote awareness on how zombies are being reflected in the society.
Zombie Symbolism
A lot of symbolism can be interpreted in popular zombie films.
The undead are the ultimate other of any us-and-them division, especially if you consider us to be savvy and them to be brainless. But Zombies were not used as just a frightening enemy, but were used to show the ills of the society: consumerism, capitalism, terrorism, etc.
Zombie Economics
Zombie economics refers to theories or ideas that are long gone, but still refuse to die.
At this basic metaphorical level, "zombie economics," for example, can describe socialists or free-market thinking, depending on which side you believe holds the monopoly on functioning synapses.
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Misconceptions About Zombies
A zombie is a walking corpse, a living dead. But not all walking corpse is a zombie.
Unlike many other undead, the zombie is mindless, vacant, without purpose. The zombie was literally enslaved by magic to perform hard labor. Thus, it is a slave to its insatiable appetite, mindlessly consuming without need. It is a slave that was created by that which enslaves it.
How Zombies are Reflected in Life
A lot of people have related zombies to the lives of humans, mostly social ills, including consumerism, racism, capitalism, and terrorism.
Most of the films about zombies are not about the zombies themselves, but on how people cope or with the reality of the undead.
Samsara = Life of a Zombie
Samsara is a belief in Buddhism meaning the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. It is new life, but it is still full of suffering. As long as we are alive, suffering is present because it is natural for us to wish for good things not to end even though we knew that it would.
Just like the zombie which suffers because of its endless hunger, never satisfied and moves on to another prey which also ends up as a zombie.
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"Zombie"
The word comes from the Hatian folklore and refers to a corpse animated by witchcraft.
In philosophy, this idea of a regular human but with no conscious experiences is known as a “philosophical zombie" or a “p-zombie". It is an argument against physicalism - the school of thought that everything that makes us human is ultimately derived from our physical characteristics.
P-zombie as a Foundation to Dualism
If a p-zombie is logically conceivable, a physical body minus the mental, then this possibility could support dualism - an alternative view that sees the world consisting of not just the physical but also the mental. In other words, since a world of zombies is imaginable, all behaving purely at the physical level, why did evolution produce consciousness in humans?
The Physicalism Analogy: A Proof to Dualism
- Physicalism says that everything in our world is physical.
- If physicalism is true, everything in out world is physical including consciousness.
- But we can conceive of a “zombie world", a physical world without consciousness then,
- Physicalism is proven false, because our world consists of both physical and mental attributes.
The existence of consciousness is a further, nonphysical fact about our world.