Summary Of The Secrets Of Haiti's Living Dead

Power is “the ability of individuals or groups to impose their will upon others and make them do things even against their own wants or wishes” (Haviland, 267). One reason for which power is used is behavior modification. In Haiti, for example, religion is used to control morality. They use the population beliefs in Voodoo to maintain people’s good behavior. The ones who do not behave properly are turned into zombies as a punishment and as an example to others. In “The Secrets of Haiti’s Living Dead,” one learns that Wade Davis is a biology student, who concentrated his research in the medical power of plants and other natural resources. He wanted to find out what was the scientific reason for Haitians to become zombies. To Haitians, zombies

They believe that this condition is given, because the voodoo priest has trapped the person’s soul. Therefore, Haitian’s definition of zombies revolves around a magic like power that the priest has over the dead. However, Davis believed that Voodoo priests had great knowledge and control over certain kinds of medicinal plants that other people could not even imagine existed. Davis believed that the voodoo priest supposedly gives a person a type of drug, which will cause he or she to fall into a death like state. This person is buried and after the drug wears off he or she wakes up. The voodoo priest will supposedly drug the person again, to keep he or she in a trance like state in which he can better control the person. Davis was focused on Datura, a power psychoactive plant, and the poison of the puffer

For fun? For profit?’ the answer covers much more than that. This belief is a type of social control mechanism. One becomes a zombie if he or she committed some type of crime, be it moral or physical. If a population believes that committing a crime can cause you to become a zombie, which does not seem like a pleasurable experience, chances are that the crime rate will diminish. What Davis found in Haiti, was a society with cohesion, with very little “crime, disorder, and rampant drug and alcohol abuse so common in many of the other Caribbean islands” (Guercio, 174). Therefore, the zombie culture is a way of power to control society’s