Abstract
Traditionally, the peoples of Southeast Asia have held beliefs in numerous forms of vampires often crossed with ghosts or other spirits, such as Pontianak of the Malay Peninsula, Phi Krasue and Phi Pop of Thailand and the Aswang and Manananggal of the Philippines. These have been theorised as manifestations of fears and repressed aspects of life, including, previously, of dangers that lurk in the wilds surrounding villages. In modern times rumours of and belief in vampires persist and have moved to cities, but these tales are also joined by a more modern bloodsucker, the organ harvester. Poorly-sourced stories of dubious veracity circulate on Facebook feeds, warning parents to keep a close eye on their children lest they are snatched away and killed for their organs. This paper examines parallels between traditional vampire legends of Southeast Asia and current rumours of organ trafficking targeting children, and delves into some of the anxieties fuelling the contemporary stories, anxieties that ultimately spring from the region’s fraught reaction to Neoliberalism.Keywords: Vampires, Southeast Asian vampires, Organ trafficking, Social media, Mythology, Neoliberalism
Highlights
The peoples of Southeast Asia have held beliefs in numerous forms of vampires often crossed with ghosts or other spirits, such as Pontianak of the Malay Peninsula, Phi Krasue and Phi Pop of Thailand and the Aswang and Manananggal of the Philippines
The accompanying text explained that these dead children were found in a truck at a border checkpoint, crossing from Malaysia into Thailand
It closed with a warning to parents to keep a close eye on their children as these organ traffickers were active in the region and were looking for more victims
Summary
Thailand police found this in a container vehicle. Dead bodies of children. I discovered through a brief web search that it was a fake story using real pictures; a story created by scammers using emotionally charged images to generate ‘likes’ on social media This practice is called ‘like-farming’, done by people who “start pages and fill them with content dedicated to collecting as many “likes” or “shares” as possible in the shortest amount of time” (Snopes, 2016). The photos contained images of products not available for sale in either Malaysia or Thailand Despite these obvious errors, the story continued to circulate so much so that Malaysian police felt compelled to respond: Kedah police chief Datuk Asri Yusoff went on record in the Malaysian newspaper Berita (Zulkifi, 2016, n.p.) saying, "I advise the public to stop spreading this case and not to believe any kind of incidents that is going viral on social media" (English translation via Tang, 2016, n.p.). The commonalities shared by these two folkloric figures, when analysed, provide a strong argument for categorizing the organ trafficker as the 21st century update of the enduring folkloric vampires of the world
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