Vampire Stories Research Articles

Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching and the Discourse of Consumption

Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching and the Discourse of Consumption Aspasia Stephanou (bio) I am very hungry. I am incomplete. —Gwendolyn Brooks In a 2009 interview for The Sunday Times, Helen Oyeyemi explains the impetus behind White Is for Witching, the tale of “a starving girl and a xenophobic house” (Machell). “I wanted to write a vampire story,” Oyeyemi recalls: After I graduated, I volunteered in South Africa for a few months. I was staying in this town called Paarl, and everyone wanted to talk about race all the time. I started to feel strange … I got this flu-like illness and spent a lot of time in bed with Dracula in the dark wing of this big house. I was feverish. I started thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider, because you’ve got this foreign count with this unnatural appetite … I thought, what’s an unnatural appetite? A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else. (Machell) White Is for Witching is by no means a conventional vampire tale, and it exploits not the familiar European vampire but the Caribbean soucouyant to represent the fear of the outsider and unnatural appetite. At the same time, however, it subverts the conventional and metaphorical associations of vampirism with the “foreign” other, as the British Nigerian Ore draws upon her knowledge of the soucouyant in order to try to understand and explain the dangerous matriarchal line of Miranda Silver’s British ancestors. White is established as the marker of evil, a whiteness that embodies British nationalism. The Caribbean soucouyant is a witch who transforms into a ball of fire after she removes her skin. She flies as this ball of flame, going through keyholes and crevices until she finds her human victim and sucks his or her life-blood. Joan Dayan appropriates this pre-colonial myth in order to analyze the colonial past and the European exploitation of the slaves. For Dayan, “these ‘monsters’ are the surfeit or remnants of an institution that turned humans into things, beasts, or mongrels” (258). The vampire functions as a metaphor in the Caribbean to stage the nightmarish consumption of the bodies of the colonized and to interrogate the relations of consumption between white and black bodies. Oyeyemi relocates these violent relations within contemporary British culture: the soucouyant here crosses borders, linking memories of a colonial past to a present which [End Page 1245] still struggles to shed its white supremacist ideology and which still revolves around unnatural consumption. The soucouyant, as Miranda’s friend and lover, Ore, observes, is an “old woman whose only interaction with other people was consumption”; she is “not content with her self. She is a double danger—there is the nightmare of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her” (Oyeyemi 155). Miranda Silver, who both meets and becomes her, is also “not content with her self.” Following in the maternal line of the Silver family, Miranda suffers from the eating disorder pica, the appetite for unusual, improper, and indigestible substances. Consumption consequently becomes the major preoccupation of White Is for Witching, and Oyeyemi interrogates the relations of consumption on both a personal and a national level. The choice of the Caribbean myth of the soucouyant and the chief protagonist’s name, Miranda, are not accidental. The conjunction is suggestive and draws attention to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a structuring myth for writing on and from the Caribbean. From Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1967) and George Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile (1960), to Edward Kamau Brathwaite in his poetry volume Islands (1969) and Aimé Césaire in his A Tempest: Adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ by a Negro Theatre (1969), critics and writers have used the trope of Prospero/Miranda to critique the colonial project in the New World. In addition, the title White is for Witching conjures up Herbert George De Lisser’s classic Jamaican novel The White Witch of Rosehall (1929) which offers a critique of British colonialism in the West Indies through the evil female power of the plantation mistress. Borrowing from the legend...

Vampire Stories in Greece and the Reinforcement of Socio-Cultural Norms

This paper investigates the relationship of humans with the supernatural and the function of the latter as a normalizing factor in social organization. The focus is on traditional Greek stories about vampires and the aim is to study the relationship between vampires and the ‘cultural capital’ of the local community, on the one hand, and, on the other, beliefs about the progress of the soul after its departure from the body upon death. The Greek vampire (vrikolakas) is examined in relation to both the concept of faith in Orthodox Christianity and traditional death rituals, some of them pagan survivals.

Defy the Dark ed. by Saundra Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Defy the Dark ed. by Saundra Mitchell Kate Quealy-Gainer Mitchell, Saundra , ed. Defy the Dark. HarperTeen, 2013. [480p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-212354-1 $17.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-06-212353-4 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-212355-8 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-10. Seventeen YA authors contribute to this collection of short stories structured around a single moment: a kiss in the dark from a stranger. There's therefore a fair amount of romance here, but it's the dark element that really holds the whole thing together with a slightly sinister thread running through every story, whether it be a realistic piece about a girl contemplating suicide ("The Moth and the Spider") or a bizarre fantasy featuring a boy with the ability to dreamwalk ("There's Nowhere Else"). The two most powerful pieces bookend the collection: Courtney Summers' opening exploration of an obsessive love that leads to a watery death is a rather ironic counterpart to Tess Gratton's closing story, an optimistic revision of Ophelia's part [End Page 521] in Hamlet that has O's love for Hal leading her to freedom from the social norms of gender and class. A few of the other stories draw on urban legends as their inspiration, and while they are salaciously enjoyable, they are also mostly predictable. Dia Reeves, Beth Revis, and Carrie Ryan build on worlds better established in their full-length novels, but their portrayals of a hellish otherworld, a claustrophobic spaceship, and the beginnings of a zombie invasion offer enough action to spur readers on. Despite the unevenness of the quality here, the collection's range of genres, from science fiction to vampire stories to realism, gives it broad appeal and offers a complement to the dystopian-laden collections popular of late. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Virtue as Adventure and Excess: Intertextuality, Masculinity, and Desire in the Twilight Series

The vampire is still primarily a literary figure. The vampires we have seen on TV and cinema in recent years are all based on literary models. The vampire is at the same time a popular cultural icon and a figure that, especially women writers, use to problematize gender, sexuality and power. As a vampire story the Twilight series both produces and problematizes norms in regard to gender, class and ethnici-ty. As the main romantic character in Twilight, Edward Cullen becomes interesting both as a vampire of our time and as a man. In a similar way as in the 19th century novel the terms of relationship are negotiated and like his namesake Edward Rochester, Edward Cullen has to change in important ways for the “happy end-ing” to take place. In spite of a strong interest in sexuality and gender norms in relation to vampires very few studies have focused exclusively on masculinity. This article examines the construction of masculinity in relation to vampirism in the Twilight series. It offers an interpretation of Stephenie Meyer’s novels and the character of Edward as part of a broader field of feminist (re-)uses of the vampire in modern literature with its roots in the literary tradition from Austen and the Brontë-sisters as well as from classic Gothic fiction.

Television vampire fandom and religion

Popular culture and fandom provide a setting where people can reflect on the questions of life. A television show defines for many of its fans what it means to be human. It also discusses the way things are, and the way they should, or could, be in our reality. In this article the author shows that tele­vision shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Vampire Diaries have made the same kind of impact on their fans. The fan writings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood and the Vampire Diaries show that these popular texts, and the communities they have formed, have greatly affected the lives of fans. People have found on their TV screens stories they can get strength and hope from. The vampire shows deal with the supernatural – vampires, werewolves, and witches – and place them in our contemporary world as if they are a natural part of it. Television vampire stories revolve around topics of death, good and evil, and humanity. These stories have created massive fan communities and even life changing fan experiences. The reflections upon existential questions, and the way the shows have empowered fans, make this phenomenon important to study in the context of today’s religions reality.

Echoes of Joyce

Echoes of Joyce John Tytell (bio) Dublinesque. Enrique Vila-Matas; Anna McLean and Rosalind Harvey, trans. New Directions. http://ndbooks.com. 245 pages; paper, $16.95. During Sandy, the much too diminutive name for what was called the hurricane of the century, my neighborhood in lower Manhattan lost power for five nights. I kept a flashlight in my pocket for the dark stairway, filled my tub with water, threw out the spoiled food, walked a few miles uptown for supplies. One night, chilled and clammy, desperate for a bath, I boiled water and cleaned myself in a turkey pot for the week as my mother said her family had in Dublin where she grew up during World War I. The hardest part was in the evening as the dimming light disappeared. We had half a dozen candles, but it got so cold that I wanted to read in bed by 8:00, both to stay warm and because there was little else one could do. I used the flickering candlelight as well as my flashlight to illuminate the page and focus on words and sentences. On a shelf I was reserving for summer reading I had a novel called Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas whom I had never read, much less even heard of previously, although the Catalan writer was reputed to be one of Spain's leading novelists. Despite that reputation and his translation into thirty languages, Vila-Matas had only recently been brought before an American public, thanks to the agency of New Directions, a small house that specializes in such corrections of our insularity. I have a propensity for Dublin and James Joyce. I often use Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) in classes, though my students usually find Stephen Dedalus, its protagonist, too precious for their tastes, and Joyce's language too rich and rambunctious, too self-consciously poetic. I even devoted a semester in a seminar to Ulysses (1922), a novel set in Dublin over thirty-six hours, which is still considered to be the masterpiece fiction written in English in the twentieth century. My predisposition for Dublin was also a matter of personal heritage. My mother spent her refugee childhood in Dublin and could have been a character in Dubliners (1914), Joyce's early book of realistic stories. I had told her story of bathing in a wooden tub and fetching a wooden bucket of stout for her father on the way home from school in The James Joyce Quarterly. With the first almost fatuously funny words of Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas defines his valiantly quixotic narrator, Samuel Riba, as belonging to "an increasingly rare breed of sophisticated literary publishers." For the 30 years that Riba has been in the book trade, he has watched its members—"publishers who still read and who have always been drawn to literature"—"gradually, surreptitiously dying out." He sees himself as the last genuine publisher. Riba tells us his firm has gone bankrupt because he refused to exploit the cheap Gothicism of vampire stories. If such failures can ever be regarded as surreptitious, it is because they are considered insignificant from both the business and human perspective, as negligible as the farmer selling his fields to a suburban real estate developer, though much less profitable. Riba takes great pride in the novels he has published, though he has never managed to find the unknown genius he wanted to publish for the world. All he has is a lot of unsold and out-of-print editions he has published, and a literary catalog which is like the transcript of his achievement and the record of a lifetime of selection. He has been a compulsive reader, and he even reads his own life as a literary text. He sets a higher bar for reading and writing than for living: The same skills needed for writing are needed for reading. Writers fail readers but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. For Riba, reading is a "way of being in the world: an instrument for interpreting, sequence after...

Helen Oyeyemi and the Yoruba gothic: White is for Witching

White is for Witching is the vampire story Helen Oyeyemi conceived whilst reading Dracula and, despite its modern setting, it shares generic features and thematic concerns with this nineteenth-century gothic novel. Both can be described as narratives of reverse colonization, as described by Stephen D. Arata, which highlight fears that Englishness will be contaminated by the immigration of racial “others” into England. This article shows how Oyeyemi develops the genre through the introduction of Yoruba tropes, such as abiku, aje, and ancestors, not to create a new subgenre of “Yoruba gothic”, but to draw attention to the cycles of immigration, co-existence, and integration that have always existed in English history. In this way, White is for Witching forms a counter-narrative to the notion of racial purity associated with English nationhood that was crystallized during the colonial period and persists in the present through immigration policies informed by an “imperial ideology”.

Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933

Reviewed by: Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 Thomas W. Kniesche Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933. By Erik Butler. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010. ix + 225 pages. $75.00. The purpose of Erik Butler's book is to provide "a coherent, historically informed theory of the vampire" and "to account for the logic underlying the vampire's many and conflicting forms" (vii). At first glance, this seems to be a lofty goal for such a relatively slim volume, but the author is able to cover a lot of ground. Literary and non-literary texts by English, French, and German authors and films from the Weimar period are used to shed light on the figure of the vampire. The last chapter adds Hollywood movies, the TV show Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, the novels of Anne Rice, and [End Page 112] other monsters, such as cyborgs and zombies, to the mix. The historical framework indicated in the subtitle hints at his major thesis. According to Butler, the vampire is an eminently modern phenomenon: it owes its far-reaching impact and ongoing fascination to processes of change and transformation, to the crises that are constantly generated by modernization and the uncertainties and upheavals in its wake. Butler dismisses the countless pre-modern examples of vampire stories and myths of similar beings that are a staple of many diverse cultures and maintains that "real" vampires did not exist before the 1700s (5). In his introduction, Butler calls his methodological approach to the topic of vampirism a "[c]ultural teratology" (1) and defines the term as "the science of phenomena that contravene the rules of regularity and stability [ . . . ]" (8). He lists Carlo Ginzburg, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and René Girard as his sources of inspiration (8-9). He also freely admits his "debt to psychoanalysis" and states that "in large part, the study reads works as imaginary projections" (viii). His readings are indeed informed by Freudian and, to a limited extent, Lacanian concepts, but the study does not provide any in-depth discussion of psychoanalytic thinking. Referring to Foucault's Madness and Civilization, Butler argues that monstrosity is that against which man defines himself and his normalcy. He then goes on to claim that the vampire is a different kind of monster: by shape-shifting all the time, the vampire does not provide a steady monstrosity that would allow "us" to define ourselves. "Instead of giving us a stable enemy, the vampire belongs to multiple worlds, including our own. It therefore reflects an anxiety that we, perhaps, do not know at all who 'we' are" (9). The first of three parts of the book is devoted to the beginning of the modern discourse on vampires in the early 18th century and to the image of the vampire in the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Chapter One discusses early reports of vampirism in Eastern Europe and shows that vampirism was invented as a scholarly discourse during a time of crisis and confusion, brought about by secularization and metaphysical uncertainty. Butler also stresses the political dimension of the belief in vampires and claims that "Serbian vampirism suggested the vulnerability of the House of Habsburg" (36). The second chapter highlights the vampire as a means of political satire. According to this line of reasoning, in the late 18th and early 19th century, the vampire was "a uniquely dynamic allegory for the depersonalizing aspects of modernization" (54). The Romantic vampire—in the works of Shelley, Baudelaire, Brentano, and Heine—is, according to Butler, an extension of the writer's "sense of dislocation and alienation resulting from political transformations" (63). The second part of the study, entitled "England and France," looks at the 19th century vampire and features Polidori's vampire Lord Ruthven and Bram Stoker's Count Dracula. What is new about these two vampires, according to Butler, is that they represent the fluidity of modern class relations. Although Lord Ruthven may have been modeled after Lord Byron (88), the former also bears traits of a "factory owner" (92). Butler notes that Bram Stoker's Dracula establishes himself in London via "property deeds...

Conjuring the Curse of Repetition or “ Sleeping Beauty ” Revamped : Angela Carter’s Vampirella and The Lady of the House of Love*

This article illustrates Angela Carter’s literary practice through her utilization of “ Sleeping Beauty ” in the radio play Vampirella and its prose variation The Lady of the House of Love. It argues that Carter vampirised European culture as she transfused old stories into new bodies to give them new life and bite. Her experiments with forms, genres and mediums in her vampire fiction capture the inherent hybridity of the fairy tale as it sheds new light on her main source, Charles Perrault’s La Belle au bois dormant, bringing to the fore the horror and terror as well as the textual ambiguities of the French conte that were gradually obscured in favor of the romance element. Carter’s vampire stories thus trace the “ dark ” underside of the reception of the tale in Gothic fiction and in the subculture of comic books and Hammer films so popular in the 1970s, where the Sleeping Beauty figure is revived as a femme fatale or vamp who takes her fate in her own hands.

Hybrid vigour: Heterogeneity, horror and history in George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream

Equal parts antebellum steamboat odyssey and gothic vampire story, Fevre Dream (1982) is a consciously hybrid novel, one that embodies, encompasses and ultimately transcends multiple genres. My article uses Monster Theory – especially Nina Auerbach’s theory that vampires tend to personify a historical Zeitgeist – to deconstruct the generic play of Fevre Dream, demonstrating that the novel’s hybridism, rather than undermining aesthetic unity of effect, in fact engenders its success both as a historical novel and a tale of terror. In doing so the article not only interrogates the rigidity of generic boundaries but shows how the horrific specifically can complement rather than contaminate an otherwise realistic historical narrative.

Fearless Vampire Kissers: Bloodsuckers We Love in Twilight, True Blood and Others

The figure of the vampire has been an important element of popular culture for more than a century. The movies have been a home for vampire stories, and they have presented them as unusually frightening images. A recent explosion of vampire screen works reveals a new emphasis on addressing female issues as opposed to male issues and focusing on the erotic attraction of the vampire rather than the fear. As a fictional, but very obvious, example of an alien group in our midst, vampires are like many sub-groups. The change from fear to arousal may augur a change in sentiment that allows us to be more welcoming of outsiders.

Rethinking the Book

As we near end of first decade of twenty-first century, interest in practice of readers' advisory (RA) continues to be strong, as evidenced by range of RA programs offered at conferences, resources created in both print and electronic formats, and expanding number of readers' advisors. As value of readers' advisory is increasingly accepted across library community, practitioners are looking at new directions to take RA services. Here, David Beard and Kate Vo Thi-Beard examine possibilities that a stronger understanding of reading theory offer for readers' advisors. The authors call for a closer tie between research into reading behavior and practice of readers' advisory in library. David Beard is Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at University of Minnesota-Duluth, where he researches interdisciplinary approaches to rhetoric and literacy. Kate Vo Thi-Beard is a doctoral student in School of Library and Information Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of interest include visual and popular media (including graphic novels and magazines), multiculturalism, and LIS education.--Editor Readers' Advisory is experiencing a renaissance in library practice and critical reflection. As a result, we better understand tools of readers' advisory (RA), uses of those tools (especially online tools), and pressures that falling budgets and increasingly varied library collections place upon traditional RA work. But there is a limitation inherent in RA derived from its emphasis on book rather than practice of reading. The bulk of literature on RA and bulk of its tools focus on book as an object. There is a strange faith that, if we find better ways to describe object, we can more easily connect object to patron. Such efforts are important; being able to describe a novel in terms of its genre, setting, characters, and plots is an important first step in RA. But research in literacy challenges idea that readers select a book based on its features. A simple example of current practice makes clear our position. If a young person liked Harry Potter, give them a book with a wizard; it has same features, after all. If you enjoy Anita Blake vampire stories, try Anne Rice--her books have vampires, too. Why do we presume that this approach makes for effective RA? This essay makes three moves. First, it makes clear state of art in RA practice and RA tools. Then, it places that practice and those tools in productive tension with current research in reading behavior. Finding that current models for RA are out of step with research on why people read, we can then probe question, what would RA look like if it were inflected by current research in literacy practices? DEFINING READERS' ADVISORY RA is akin to reference because it's an interaction between patron and library staff with general aim to connect patron to resources--whether fictional, informational, or both. (Jessica Moyer talks about the theory of 'incidental information acquisition.' (1) For instance, by reading a contemporary romance novel set in Italy, readers may feel that they learn about country's features.) RA is an organic extension of array of reference services already offered in library. Maybe equally important for library as a social institution, RA establishes a connection between patron and library According to RA Committee of Reference and User Services Association's Collection Development and Evaluation Section, at its core, reader/librarian interaction is a discussion about books.... The goal of readers' advisory transaction is to make reader feel that library is a welcoming place to come and talk about stories that are important to them. (2) The RA interaction is what distinguishes a library from a stack of books at checkout lane at grocery story. …

Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil (review)

Reviewed by: Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil Heide Crawford (bio) Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Edited by Peter Day. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2006. ix + 243 pp. $70.00. Much has been written about the history of the vampire in folklore, literature and film in recent years, but with this edited volume, Peter Day traces the vampire from its early origins in folklore to its most modern reincarnation [End Page 518] as a metaphor for the human condition in one volume. To accomplish this, Day has organized in two parts a total of fifteen essays (Part I: "Legends of the Vampire," and Part II: "Vampires for the Modern Mind") that address the cultural-historical beginnings of the vampire, how it functions in literature, film, art, and even legalese as a metaphor for the human condition. As Day states in his introduction, "vampires have proved to be incredibly adaptive survivors, flourishing in the media and thriving in the popular imagination of modern societies" (ix). The vampire is clearly an icon of horror that has endured for centuries, some might argue for millennia, and several contributors refer to Nina Auerbach's seminal work on the enduring image of the vampire, Our Vampires, Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 1997) when they reference her observation that vampires reflect the cultures that they inhabit (6). However, what distinguishes the vampire from other monsters—whether in folklore, literature, art or film—is that the vampire has a recognizable, if not an often beautiful, human form. As several contributors to this volume mention (for example, Pete Remington), the vampire often demonstrates very human characteristics, such as regret and depression about its monstrous nature, which distinguishes it from other monsters in literature, art, and film. Day begins his volume with an essay by Elizabeth Miller, who has published extensively on Bram Stoker's paradigmatic vampire novel Dracula (1897). In her essay, Miller clears up misconceptions about Stoker's approach to writing his novel by presenting the likely sources for Stoker's vampire. She makes it clear that Stoker "did not base his vampire story on legends connected with the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler" (3), but that he simply used the name, because he discovered that the word "Dracula" means "devil" in Wallachian. Though Miller does mention that the vampire entered western European literature in the eighteenth century in Germany, she associates its origins in German literature with the onset of Romantic literature toward the end of the century. In fact, the first vampire poem in German literature, "Der Vampir" by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, was published in 1747. Several contributors to this volume address the cultural-historical origins of vampire beliefs in their essays in Part I. Darren Oldridge investigates the historical construction of belief in his essay, asking the question: "If perfectly rational, well-educated people could accept the existence of roaming corpses three hundred years ago, why is the same idea inconceivable today?" (83). He explores this problem by borrowing a concept from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, which posits that "people make sense of things around them in the context of a 'system of belief'" (83). Considering the plethora of vampire literature that addresses its origins in southeastern Europe and its [End Page 519] representation in nineteenth-century British literature, Phil Bagust's essay on the history of the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine, is a refreshing exploration of the demonization of this animal, which was the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. In his essay, Bagust demonstrates how vampiric traits, such as a preference for attacking the jugular vein of an animal and devouring particular organs such as the liver as opposed to the whole carcass, were applied to the Thylacine in an effort to demonize it and officially sanction its persecution. The result is that its vampiric image has endured in popular culture. Peter Mario Kreuter's essay is not so much an actual critical investigation of theories surrounding the etymology of the word "vampire," as it is an emotionally-laden defense of his own claims in his book Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa. Studien zur Genese, Bedeutung und Funktion. Rumänien und der Balkanraum (Weidler, 2001) [Vampire belief in southeastern Europe...

Editorial: Popular concerns about medical research projects in sub‐Saharan Africa – a critical voice in debates about medical research ethics

Popular concerns about blood-stealing, trade in body parts, surreptitious birth control and the deliberate spreading of disease are common across sub-Saharan Africa, and there are indications that they are becoming more common in pace with the process of deprivation that economic and political destructuring has, over the last quarter century, set in motion across most of the continent (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). Such stories are commonly referred to as ‘rumours’ – by those who observe and dismiss them, but also by those who, usually with due scepticism, pass them on to others. With its connotation of hearsay and gossip, the term is often used in contrast to ‘truth’, much like the equally problematic distinction of ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’. It is our aim in this paper to move beyond the dismissal of these stories as ‘mere’ rumour, based on erroneous belief or traditional superstition, and to appreciate them as modern commentaries on social relations that involve, and extend far beyond, scientific medical research. If we nevertheless use the words ‘rumour’, ‘story’ and ‘concern’ synonymously, we follow the historian Luise White’s understanding that rumours, such as vampire stories in 20th-century Africa, ‘are neither true nor false, in the sense that they do not have to be proven beyond their being talked about; but as they are told, they contain different empirical elements that carry different weights: stories are told with truths, commentaries, and statements of ignorance’ (White 2000). By telling these stories, relating them to empirical facts in a given locality and at a particular moment, and intertwining them with other seemingly unrelated tales, people make new connections and reveal hitherto unseen links, weaving wide, often global connections into local patterns of relatedness (Geissler 2005). When, below, we speak of ‘rumour’ we are not expressing our scepticism; rather, we are reflecting the scepticism of those who tell these stories: their ambiguity towards formations of knowledge and power that reach deep into their everyday lives, and which are set in a world order that provokes their doubts. Medical research and the ‘trial communities’ it constitutes by linking scientists and subjects, institutions and funders, media and publics, is one of the networks of global connections that has been particularly prolific in the generation of rumours (P.W. Geissler and C. Molyneux, in press). The sort of rumours mentioned above, particularly those about blood, are often directly related to medical research and health interventions. During 15 years of involvement in medical research in Africa we have repeatedly encountered such rumours. From friends and colleagues we have heard many more reports of such rumours, sometimes impeding recruitment to research, affecting adherence to interventions and even threatening the continuation of whole research projects while more commonly providing a background noise without direct impact (Geissler 2005; Molyneux et al. 2005a; Pool & Geissler 2005; Fairhead et al. 2006; for a rare note in a medical paper, see Nchito et al. 2003; for the potential detrimental impact of public debates see most recently Singh & Mills 2005). Most of these rumours follow a relatively limited number of themes, while also showing regional and locally specific variation. On a more general level they merge into related genres such as urban legends and oral traditions (Burke 1998; Ellis & Ter Haar 2001), Tropical Medicine and International Health doi:10.1111/j.1365-3156.2006.01682.x

Cannibals and Kitchen Sinks

rom serial killers to disease narratives to organ transplants to the spread of mad cow disease, flesh-eating (in one form or another) pervades twentiethand twenty-first-century existence," Priscilla Walton asserts in her book Our Cannibals, Ourselves (152). As this disparate list suggests, Walton's focus is less on literal cannibalistic acts and practices than it is on "diffuse and metaphoric" (28) deployments of anthropophagous imagery throughout contemporary popular culture. In seven brief yet wide-ranging chapters, Walton surveys cannibal symbolism in classic literary and travel narratives, in coverage of modern pandemics such as Ebola fever, in popular alien-invasion and vampire stories, in panics over mad cow disease, in representations of eating disorders, in serial killers narratives, and in contemporary consumer culture generally, dominated as it is by "various media frenzies and the compulsion to devour" (7). Many of the connections Walton makes, and a number of her readings of what is admittedly an impressively broad range of materials, are quite arresting, but her tendency to treat cannibalism in such a flexible way, to find the metaphor in such a scattered assortment of sites, ultimately fatally attenuates the concept. Walton herself seems at times concerned that her focus is too vague and wandering. "Although it might seem a stretch to move from flesh-eating to self-starvation," she comments in a section on anorexia nervosa, "it is imperative to remember that when the body

The Old English Poem "A Vampyre of the Fens": A Bibliographical Ghost

Dudley Wrights’ book Vampires and Vampirism (1914) might well be said to be the first serious attempt in English to compile vampire stories and reports from all over the world, as well as to elucidate how far a certain amount of scientific truth might underlie these accounts. In this work, the author makes a statement that has passed unnoticed for both Anglosaxonists and vampire hunters: ‘There is an Anglo-Saxon poem with the title A Vampyre of the Fens (186). The veracity of this claim is demolished by the fact that students and scholars of Old English literature well know that such a poem does not exist. Besides, the dearth of vampiric literature in England before William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh or Walter Map is widely attested. Finally, it is significant that the term ‘vampyre’ was not used in English until 1734, as reported by the Oxford English Dictionary. The evidence that refutes Wrights affirmation is, as we can see, overwhelming, and yet there is some truth in his words.

A contribution to the vampire studies among Serbs or vampire stories from Luznica

This paper is the result of original fieldwork performed in the village of Strelac, in southeast Serbia during August 2003. All Slavs believed in the existence of a vampire; still today, this belief is widespread among Serbs. According to the folk stories, a man can become a vampire during his life or after death. It is believed that certain persons have a predisposition to become vampires: informants argued that the condition could descend by inheritance, or if an animal steps over a deceased person. A man can also become a vampire during his lifetime if he suffers from certain illness, but does not take medications, or if, when ill, he is left alone or abandoned by his family. In most cases a vampire hunts his relatives or neighbors, or disturbs their cattle. A vampire makes noise, troubles its relatives, jumps on their back, and sometimes sucks their blood. There are two ways of protection against a vampire: to scold and push a vampire away, and to face the creature in order to "speak out". The "speak-out" method means that a vampire needs to be told about everything it did as a vampire. If a vampire is a vampire-deceased, it is possible to "lure" it with round bread, and banish it from the village. The villagers here use "vampire's bone" for this purpose. These beliefs encourage people to take care of their sick - the ones who do not do so get frequent visits from a vampire.

Vampire legends in contemporary American culture: what becomes a legend most

While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the 19th century, it has been in the last decades of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century that they have become a central part of American culture. This volume examines how vampire stories - from Bram Stoker's to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi to Love at First Bite - have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human. This text looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the televison series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate both current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.

Alternative Spiritualities and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Some practices in Alternative Spiritualities have been criticised by social commentators for their ‘appropriation’ of indigenous cultures. This article will argue that ‘appropriation’ is not limited to these cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selective parts of history. Furthermore, this cultural consumption is not restricted to history alone, but is extended to contemporary popular culture, such as people and groups who find inspiration for their spirituality from the fictions of H.P. Lovecraft, vampire stories and the Star Wars mythos. Following Fredric Jameson's work on Postmodernism, this article will provide an insight into how the cultural consumption of history and popular culture by people involved in Alternative Spiritualities has become part of the cultural logic of late capitalism.

Cultural Consumption of History and Popular Culture in Alternative Spiritualities

Some practices in alternative spiritualities - for example, New Age and neopaganism - have been criticized by social commentators and some indigenous people for their appropriation of indigenous cultures, such as those of Australian Aborigines and North American Indians. This article argues that appropriation is not limited to indigenous cultures but is part of a larger phenomenon, that of cultural consumption of selected parts of history. This cultural consumption is not confined to history but extends to contemporary popular culture; for example, groups who find spiritual inspiration in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu mythos), vampire stories and the science fiction (SF) novel by Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, which inspired the Church of All Worlds. This article provides an insight into the cultural consumption of history and popular culture by people involved in alternative spiritualities. It is argued that this eclectic cultural consumption produces new and subjective myths in contemporary western culture.