The Serpent and the Rainbow

An ethnobotany and popular science narrative arguing that Haitian zombification is both a pharmacological process involving tetrodotoxin and a social process rooted in rural belief, punishment, and Bizango secret-society authority. One of the most culturally influential books in the twentieth-century Haiti cluster, the book helped fix the Haitian zombi in Anglophone popular imagination through the Clairvius Narcisse case while also trying to rescue the figure from horror-movie caricature by grounding it in rural justice and personhood. Best read critically alongside Ramsey and Métraux — the book's outsider-adventurer voice and scientific framing enlarged the exoticization it sought to challenge, making it a key document in the late-twentieth-century remaking of Haiti for foreign readers.