Interview with Wade Davis on Haitian Zombies

In his interview with Wade Davis talking about zombies in Haiti, the host employed different tactics to induce the guest to talk about his findings. Some questions and comment he made are planned and some are improvised. From me, one distinct of an unplanned questions is the large use of discourse markers, also known as filler like “well” “uh” “you know” which signifies struggle of expressions of one’s ideas in his brain. The interview is about an anthropologist and his book about his research in Haiti. The interviewer had obviously made abundant preparations before the interview because he asked many questions with quotes from the book. So one lesson for a successful interview to me is to be fully prepared to the topic and the people we are going to interview otherwise we are much less likely to receive meaningful response. Another point I get from the interview is to respect our guest. During the talk, there are times when the host were raising questions and the guest started to answer before the end of the questions. The host immediately stopped his question and leave the stage to the guest. And also the interviewer was very careful about his expressions. In some questions, he kept rephrasing or used several questions to narrow the topic down, to make his questions more understood.

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Transcription of questions and comments from the interviewer (some parts are overlapped with the interviewee’s words and I failed to capture them)

Tell me what you set out to do? Is this essentially an academic exercise or en exercise in adventure writing?

But as I think as you came back and as you start to sort it through your materials, you let the book as an example, so much as a begin so much as a good old thrilling adventures yearn. You must’ve been aware that as you are writing it. —all the professors and the beautiful daughters and all those things happened, do you have a kinda—it just set out—I mean it served like a movie.

What do the academic community generally think of what—‘cause what’s the evidence? What’s some stories that peaked their interests and you got asked to go down there to outline what they thought was—

Give me the n? case 

This guy had died and they had all the symptoms they knew that he turned blue and that all the stuff about it. And in 1980, here comes a guy.

So they got all the way,the S no bottom  and they said: “you go down there to see if there are drugs that can do this”, right? And tell me now how do you go—coz you had been to Haiti before. You do have a lot of travelling. You kicked around the world and walked into the jungle of South America. Just take me to the Haiti with you because you go right there, you get off quickly to...

I want you to tell me a little bit of the drug because your scholarship really shows out in the book as you go through that you’ve obviously read all the literature on all drugs and it’s fascinating because—it seems—it’s half romance half science as you can tell. I’m really oversimplifying it  and you can straight me out pharmacologically. 

You said as you were talking about this morning and this is also evidence in the book. As you say that there are certain communities assumptions. If you don’t believe in there it doesn’t work.

Would you be a little hypothetical because you didn’t witnessed this but you’ve put together whatever evidence. Tell me what could happen in a village where I guess out of line where somebody gets a zombie and...give them the powder.

You can knock someone down so fast that they are breathing.

To what extend do you—by the hypothesis of a secret society or a set of secret societies with access to the information with the threat of turning one into zombie if you go against what they’re doing in their community because this is—the book is much about Haiti and the history of Haiti and the darkness of the society. You buy the existence of the society?

What about bringing people back? What about coming back from zombie?

Is there any quick, easy, handy lesson from all the medicine out of your discovery because you have confirm from what you talked about...