Zombies, symptômes d’une époque terrifiée

• Main Author: Maxime Coulombe
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Éditions de la Sorbonne 2015-09-01
• Series: Socio-anthropologie
• Subjects: Zombies; Pessimism; State of Nature; Romero; Cinema
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/2127

Zombies are everywhere. Their popularity tends to make us forget that they are not only commercial products but also psychic products of our time. In fact, these mythical creatures, presumably originating from Black Africa and entered through Western culture via Haiti, have a long history. Their meaning changed, expressing the fears and anxieties of the times when they appeared. In Haiti, their character represented the fear of slavery and of Christian resurrection ; in the United States of the 1960’s, it proved to be a representation of divine punishment ; and since 2000, it is the embodiment of our pessimism, our fear of techno science, and of our feeling that we are on the verge of returning to the “state of nature”. Each time, the zombie is the symptom of an anxiety, a tension driving along a culture. More than ever, fictions behave like revealing objects.