Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Zombie as Ethical Guardian: An Aperitif Before Consumption?

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by Todne Thomas Chipumuro

It’s Halloween season. The crisp fall air pairs with the final scenes of colorful foliage. Children are giddy with the prospects of receiving candy in exchange for their cute or frightening frocks. College students appear to be just as excited as they whisper about weekend plans and costume choices with their classmates. Amongst the bevy of options they contemplate and discuss are the supernatural cast of characters that include vampires, witches, fairies, werewolves, and zombies.

Within a contemporary U.S. socio-cultural milieu, zombies often appear in films as a destructive horde singularly focused on cannibalizing humans who are often left to survive amidst the ruins of shattered societies. From the ravenous, rotting corpses that terrorize remnant communities on The Walking Dead and World War Z, to the virally-infected hosts that horrify humans in I Am Legend, Resident Evil, and 28 Days Later, to the disenchanted but awkwardly well-meaning zombies of Warm Bodies, zombies have become more than fixtures of the silver screen. Zombies and the forms of apocalypse they foretell have become their own genre of U.S. popular culture that illustrate the disasters that can be wrought by an over-zealous bio-industrial military complex, capitalist overconsumption, and, I would argue, the dystopia of economic recession. Not just a cinematic fixture, the zombie emerges as a symbol of danger, lifelessness, ugliness, and contagion that has been mobilized to describe economics, modernity, Jesus, and even pumpkins. More broadly, the zombie emerges as a figure that exists beyond the boundaries of life and humanity. Animated but not alive, consumptive but never satiated, the zombie symbolizes liminality in perpetuity—the social condition of being caught betwixt and between states of existence, the alienations of capitalism, and the limbo of postmodernity.

Far from a contemporary creation, the zombie of the U.S. popular culture landscape descends from two predecessors: the zombie produced through a U.S. imperial and racial imaginary during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the zonbi of Vodou religious culture. The U.S. popular cultural zombie emerged as a bricolage of foreign travelogues, folklore accounts, and U.S. military accounts of Vodou religious practice shaped by unexamined imperialist beliefs in Haitian racial and religious primitivism. If Vodou (a syncretic religion generated by enslaved Africans’ creative combinations of traditional African religious practices and Catholic ritual ways and iconography) became mobilized as evidence of Haitian social degeneracy and incapacities for self-governance, the zombie became a symbolic lynchpin in the argument for U.S. military and economic intervention.

Translated from the pages of foreign accounts into the emerging horror genre of Hollywood with the film White Zombie (1932), the zombie emerged as a “postcolonial sub-subaltern monster” that terrorized white western audiences with the prospects of being “dominated, subjugated, and effectively ‘colonized’ by a native pagan” (Bishop 2008: 141-142). The zombie, then, first entered U.S. popular culture as a symbol of racial and imperial anxieties about Western dominance and postcolonial retribution. The zombie imagery popularized by Romero’s famous film Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in a different decade but reflects related socio-political constructs about racial otherness and societal decay.

The zonbi of Vodou religious culture provocatively speaks to another set of historical and ethical concerns. For Vodou practitioners, the zonbi symbolizes the ways in which the stakeholders of the French plantation regime attempted to reduce enslaved persons to the value of the labor produced by their bodies. If, as aptly worded by Martinican intellectual Aime Cesaire in Discourse on Colonialism, “colonization = thingification,” the zonbi (a laboring body devoid of agency whose sole purpose is to minister to the desires and whims of the bokor/sorcerer who resurrected him/her) becomes a powerful illustration of the dehumanization and commoditization of slavery.

In the postcolonial society made possible by a successful Haitian revolution against the French, the zonbi continued to reflect exploitative social dynamics through its association with the torture and silencing of dissidents and everyday individuals during a Duvalier regime that was imagined as an ensorcelling dictatorship. Aside from the zonbi’s reflection of the exploitative evacuation of human agency by colonial and postcolonial stakeholders, a number of theories abound about the socio-cultural and ethno-botanical constructions of the zonbi. One such reading outlines the zonbi as an embodied form of punishment against individuals who grossly violate community ethics. As described by anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister:

One extreme and rare form of punishment these societies can hand down to a criminal is to be made into a zonbi zo kadav, whereby his spirit is extracted from his body and his body is sold into modern-day slavery to cut cane on a sugar plantation….The body is then left as a religious and social corpse” (2012: 469-470).

The zonbi created as a community response to malignant individualism is just as stringent as it is allegedly final. While such a process of zonbification raises important questions about vigilantism, power, representation, and agency, I would also contend that the zonbi of Vodou religious culture can be understood as a symbolic guardian of an ethics of reciprocity. The zonbi’s plight across a variety of Haitian contexts and imaginations thus speaks not only to an indemnification of overconsumption but of communities interested in making interventions to prevent social cataclysm. Thus, the zonbi emerges as an individual objectified figure constituted by a broader narrative of community agency. As argued by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton in their cross-cultural study of zombie appropriation, “In many respects it looks as though the Haitian zombie is a thing of the past, permanently eclipsed by the success of Romero’s cannibals” (2011: 5). But what if we take a moment to place the zonbi in its proper context? To do so would be to partake of an aperitif—to study our understandings of community, the ethics of social relationship, and the legacy and contemporary dimensions of U.S. socio-political engagements rather than robotically consuming an appropriated icon.

 

Works Cited

Bishop, Kyle

2008      The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Voodoo Zombie. Journal of American Culture 31(2): 141-152

Cesaire, Aime

2000[1972] Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Moreman, Christopher and Rushton, Cory, eds.

2011       Race, Oppression, and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition

McAlister, Elizabeth

2012        Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies. Anthropological Quarterly 85(2): 457-486.

You majored in religion? So… You’re a priest?

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Blaine Billingsley

Blaine Billingsley, Religion Alumnus

If you haven’t heard of Google you’ve been living as an ascetic in the desert–St. Antony style!–for the last 15 years. Blaine Billingsley, one of the UVM Religion Department’s alumni, is currently working as designer for Gmail–and to be completely honest, before hearing him speak I had no idea how he got there.

In a way, Blaine stumbled upon his position at Google. With no experience in coding (apart from what all of the Myspace generation had of HTML), Blaine was living in Austin, Texas when a friend suggested they move to San Fransisco. Within weeks Blaine was living on the edge of Silicon Valley working at a low budget startup learning the ropes of Excel data entry. Blaine laughingly told us that he told his interviewer that he was “EXCEL-ent” and knew exactly what he was he was doing… but he didn’t. He “EXCEL-ed” anyway, and eventually landed at Google.

Since joining Google, Blaine has actually done some interviewing himself as a hirer for Google. He says that Liberal Arts students are at the top of his list of candidates. He remarked that the majors in the humanities create “good thinkers.” He expressed that having been a religion major, he sees the world creatively and he brings new ideas to the (tech) table. Speaking with him was a pleasure and I personally found it reassuring that while building resumes is important, building people is vital as part of higher education.

Blaine says that when someone reads your resume and sees “Religion” as your major, they often ask if you are a priest – once you explain you’re not, you get the opportunity to explain what it is you actually know from college. “When you major in business, people have an idea of what you learned in college. But when you major in religion, you get to set those expectations of what a religion major does,” Blaine said.

After this discussion, we moved on to the most important bit: what was his most notable Sugarman story? Blaine’s response: Upon graduating from high school he deferred for a semester to trek around Europe (I’m envious). While in a crummy Venice hostel he met two Americans and told him he would be heading to UVM in the spring. They immediately replied: YOU HAVE TO TAKE A CLASS WITH SUGARMAN! So now with Sugarman in mind, he headed to Germany where he met ANOTHER UVM pal who also urged this soon to be religion undergrad to absolutely NOT–under any circumstances–miss out on the Sugarman experience.

It’s rare that current students get to hear directly from alumni, and as a current REL major, it was refreshing and a relief to hear of success for religion majors (especially outside of academia). Look out Google, I may not know business or high-level tech, but I’ll soon have the same credentials as Blaine.

Interested in more events like this? Join the RelStuds (or Religious Studies Club)! Check us out on instagram: @relstuds or on Facebook.

A Good Gift – From, not to, a Monk

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Today, it was raining in Burlington, and so I have been walking around with a brownish orange umbrella. This is not a particularly remarkable umbrella, except for perhaps the fact that it was given to me by a novice in Thailand. A year and a half ago, I was in Chiang Mai, studying Thai at a program run by the University of Washington and Chiang Mai University (language work, alas, is never done). I was spending the two months with my then five year old daughter. We had rented a bike for the two months, and she rode on a bench on the back of the one speed bicycle, and we went all over town. Fortunately for us, the first part of the rainy season (which usually starts in mid-July) was pretty dry, and so we really were able to get away with not having much in the way of rain gear. However, one day, when I picked her up from the Thai pre-school she was attending (learning Thai much more quickly than I), this run of luck ran out. As often happened when I picked her up, we picked up a few bottles of yakult (a Japanese yogurt drink that can be found at any of the ubiquitous 7-11s in Thailand), or an ice cream cone and walked over to the wat next door to the preschool. This was your standard old wat in Chiang Mai: perhaps 500 years old, it couldn’t quite decide if it was a community temple, or a tourism oriented temple, so it ended up being both. Regardless, soon as we were sitting there snacking, the heavens opened up and we, raincoat-less and umbrella-less, were stuck. And we were stuck for a long time. There was a small sala with a couple of wheel of fortune fortune telling devices, and for some odd reason an old mercedes that was under a canvas wrap. We were not the only one’s stuck at the temple. There was an old woman and her daughter. They were from out of town, but the old woman had grown up nearby and so they had come to visit her old community temple. So we all sat in the sala and waited. After about 45 minutes, although the rains had not really stopped, I was ready to go home, and so I put my daughter on our bike and started to mentally prepare myself to go out into the torrent. And a novice came up with an umbrella. I said, no, really. And he said to me that I should take it, that they had a lot of umbrellas and it was fine. This went on for a few minutes, but eventually I took it and biked to our apartment one-handed in the rain (which my daughter really liked).

 

This was actually one of several umbrellas that I have received from monks in similar circumstances (one in 2001 in China and another in Bangkok in 2014). So what? While it has made my world easier (keeping a five year old dry is not a terrible idea), does it really matter that a monk gave me an umbrella?

 

Scholars often talk about monks as fields of merit. This means that they provide lay people with the opportunity to make merit by being worthy of receiving gifts. Gifts (Dana) which make merit, as Reiko Ohnuma and Maria Heim have talked about, are gifts that go to figures that are presumably morally superior, such as anyone in robes. In other words, we normally think of gifts passing in one direction from lay people to monks (and indeed that is normally the way that they pass).

 

However, monks receive far more than they can use. While there are occasional examples of monks who engage in conspicuous consumption (in the movie, the Funeral, there is a great scene where a Buddhist priest gets out of a big old limousine in slow motion), many of these monks get in trouble (like the Thai Phra Nen Kham, whose indiscretions with the wealth donated to him was revealed inadvertently when he was captured wearing ray bans on his private jet in June 2013). Every year, monks, particularly senior monks right around now receive many different sets of robes (the celebration of kathina). Far more than they can use. Isn’t this wasteful, one might ask? I’ve heard monks respond to this question by saying that it’s a misunderstanding of generosity. The gifts don’t belong to them, and they spread it out. The dana moves on to others.

 

So on one level, my brownish orange umbrella was an example of a monk being a nice guy to a foreigner with a little girl. But on another, it was also an example of dana and generosity moving down the road to the next person.

Spreading the Good News: AAR’s Religious Studies Major Survey

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As some of you know, we here in the Religion Department–thanks to Kevin Trainor‘s successful grant application–participated in the American Academy of Religion‘s Survey of the Long-Term Impacts of the Religious Studies Major. Here’s what AAR says about the purpose of the survey: 

The focus of the survey is not merely upon what former majors are currently doing, but also upon what they learned (and what they wish they had learned), what parts of the major they have found to be useful, and how the study of religion has shaped their values and actions.

We are thrilled to report that of our roughly 330 alumni, 116 participated in the survey; our 58% response rate far outpaced the 37% response rate for the survey as a whole. Not only does this (statistically significant) data help us pinpoint what we do well so that we might keep on doing it, but in the couple of months we’ve had the results, it has already helped us think critically about where we might better serve our current and future students. We are so grateful to all those who participated, and as we continue to sift through the data and comments, we will make available additional information.

Here are some highlights:
(click the images to enlarge)

  • Our alumni report a 95.7% employment rate, which is more than 10% higher than the national religion major data (82.3%).

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  • Our alumni work in a variety of fields, from medicine to education to environmental science. The following represent the top areas of employment (i.e., above 7% of respondents):

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  •  The majority of our alumni report being satisfied or extremely satisfied with their Religion degrees:

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  •  And, our alumni overwhelmingly agree that their education contributes to their quality of life.

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This last chart is sure to please Prof. Richard Sugarman, who not long ago quipped to Seven Days that:

“Right now everybody is concerned with making a living. Perfectly understandable,” he says. “But you also have to make a life.”

We are pleased to see that our alums seem to be making both a living and a life.

To those who participated: thank you! We were happy to hear from you–and, well, about you. Look forward to us reaching out again, with opportunities to keep us posted on your life, get involved with students as well as other alumni, and perhaps even contribute to this blog.

Bad Gifts

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pindabaat.thailand 2009.compressed

            Every day, around Bangkok, among other places in the Theravāda world, lay people give gifts to monks. During the spring semester, when taking my son to his school in western Bangkok, I would see groups of monks from the wat just down the road. These monks walk barefoot (!) around the neighborhood, stopping to receive an offering when people proffered them. Monks would often stop by the bus stop, which was a de facto market where people would buy breakfast, and perhaps make merit. (One established market I biked by every day in Chiang Mai advertised itself in the following way: “Make Merit! Fill a monk’s bowl! Buy things! Fresh and Safe!”). Others seemed to have set rounds of houses. There was one monk who I would see standing outside of a house waiting. Normally, the lay people are supposed to wait for the monk, but the occupant of the house was an older woman who could not move quickly. So the monk waited for her, knowing that she liked to make merit most mornings. Normally, lay people give monks (and novices) food at these times, and indeed most of what is given to monks are among the “requisites” that they need for their well-being: food, daily use articles like shavers, pens and paper or books for education, medicine. Less frequently, monks are given new robes, or a begging bowl. Occasionally, though they are given less appropriate things; they are given “bad gifts.”

 

This week, I am going to give a paper on “bad gifts” at a conference called “The Ethics of Religious Giving: Historical and Ethnographic Explorations,” at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. “Bad gifts” are things given to monks that are seen as inappropriate. My research for this paper comes from watching and talking with monks and novices in Thailand and Sipsongpannā, a Theravāda Buddhist minority region in southwest China over the last twenty years. While I can’t discuss everything I say in the paper, there are a few points that I found interesting and worth highlighting here.

 

What is a bad gift? At first, I thought this would be a straightforward issue to address. A bad gift is something that Theravāda monastics should not have. Obvious choices for this would be alcohol which the most basic precepts in Buddhism forbid or a gun, which as one monk I spoke with noted “can only be used to kill.” However, there is a surprising amount of difference in what would count as a “bad gift,” depending on who you talk to, the area and how the question is framed. For example, in Thailand monks and novices are forbidden from driving cars and motorcycles and bicycles, but in Sipsongpanna in China, they do drive and ride and at least until recently, a bicycle would be offered by relatives or neighbors when a boy ordains as a novice. In other words, a bicycle is a bad gift in Thailand, but not in China. And of course bicycles are not in the vinaya.

 

What does inappropriate mean? Another question emerges from the way I framed the problem above. If bad gifts are things that are seen as “inappropriate,” what does this mean? Obviously, these would be things that someone says monks shouldn’t have, and presumably this would be because the vinaya says they shouldn’t. Monks can’t drink alcohol according to the vinaya and so beer is not good (though it’s worth noting, I have seen people give alcohol to temples, and monks accept them and have to figure out what to do with this gift). My phrasing comes not from the vinaya but from what Thai monks in particular have said to me when I asked them about bad gifts. They tended to say one of two things: that a given gift or thing is “not appropriate” (mai somkhuan) or “unattractive” (mai suay). The second is particularly striking, because it highlights how monks are often seen/understood as figures who are models for the lay folk. If one were to give cigarettes to a monk, which is not quite forbidden in Thailand, but not encouraged, this would encourage monks to do something that is “unattractive.” Again, this is different in Sipsongpannā, which has been shaped by the cultures of China (where smoking is more common) as well as the Theravāda cultures spread through mainland Southeast Asia. In Sipsongpannā giving cigarettes is not seen as inappropriate.

 

Who decides? For me, this is perhaps the most interesting point. When talking about Buddhist morality, scholars of Buddhism, monks, and lay folk have collectively tended to emphasize the importance of the vinaya, the disciplinary codes of Buddhism. The vinaya is held up as the authority, even when people are not really paying attention to the vinaya. In fact, part of what seems to be taking place is that at least at the margins, what counts as bad gifts are things that lay people decide are inappropriate or unattractive. As monks will tell you, often with a laugh, bicycles, smart phones and cigarettes are not in the vinaya (though as they also say betel is). As a result, people need to think analogically about what works and what doesn’t. I argue in the paper that despite being “below” monks in the religious hierarchy, it is lay people, in conversation with monks, and the vinaya and government authorities, that decide what counts as a good or a bad gift.