Zombies and a Decaying American Ontology

In: Journal of historical sociology, Band 32, Heft 1, S. 17-25

Abstract

AbstractWhat would it mean to take zombies seriously? Cultural savants have noted the rise of the zombie in American popular culture in the twenty‐first century. And many scholars have found the zombie useful as a lumbering, empty‐headed metaphor that could signify just about anything. The zombie might look like a loved ovne, but their flesh is rotting and their individualism has tragically withered away. Before I came to zombology, I was already fascinated by an American obsession with preventing the decay of the corpse through an exceptional devotion to embalming. I argue that the intersection of the new zombie‐ism, the rapid decline of embalming, and the mass trauma of 9/11 is significant. Playing with zombies along a spectrum from fright to humor allows Americans to work through not a crisis of meaning, but a crisis of being. The cult of individualism no longer needs a perfect biological body.