Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis

Read Christopher Mastropietro's post on our

Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture.
The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and its attendant zeitgeists of anxiety, alienation, disconnection and disenfranchisement. They trace the relationship between zombies and the theme of secular apocalypse, demonstrating that the zombie draws its power from being a perversion of the Christian mythos of death and resurrection. Symbolic of a lost Christian worldview, the zombie represents a world that can no longer explain itself, nor provide us with instructions for how to live within it.
The concept of 'domicide' or the destruction of home is developed to describe the modern crisis of meaning that the zombie both represents and reflects. This is illustrated using case studies including the relocation of the Anishinaabe of the Grassy Narrows First Nation, and the upheaval of population displacement in the Hellenistic period. Finally, the authors invoke and reformulate symbols of the four horseman of the apocalypse as rhetorical analogues to frame those aspects of contemporary collapse that elucidate the horror of the zombie.
Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis is required reading for anyone interested in the phenomenon of zombies in contemporary culture. It will also be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including students and scholars of culture studies, semiotics, philosophy, religious studies, eschatology, anthropology, Jungian studies, and sociology.

You may also be interested in:

Dr. John Vervaeke is an Assistant Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science Program. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, metaphor, and wisdom. His abiding passion is to address the Meaning Crisis that besets western culture.

Christopher Mastropietro has completed a BA in semiotics, philosophy and political science at the University of Toronto. He has been working with Dr. John Vervaeke since 2012 to formulate and publish a response to the western Meaning Crisis with convergent insights from cognitive science, philosophy and other disciplines.  Christopher takes interest in the interaction of sacred symbols with the dynamics of self-presentation and identity, and how the effects of these dynamics in personal relationships relate to wisdom and self-transcendence.

Filip Miscevic is currently a PhD student in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington, studying under Dr. Olaf Sporns in the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. He completed a BSc in cognitive science, neuroscience and computer science at the University of Toronto in 2015, where he was a student of Professor John Vervaeke. He is fascinated by how an understanding of the mind will revolutionize not only our clinical and scientific practices, but also our social and cultural ones–and in particular how it will come to bear on the Meaning Crisis discussed in this book, for which the zombie has become the flag-bearer.

© 2017 John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2017, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0113

Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.