Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 3: Folkloric Vampires
Jennifer Harrington - Vampires and Demons: The Duality of Supreme Evil
Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, USA

The vampire figure, derived from oral tradition, is historically diverse and culturally widespread. Unlike other supernatural beings of folkloric convention, the vampire has maintained a relatively static character and pervasive position in modern society.
This paper provides a folkloric, cultural, historical, clinical and analytical perspective of the undead through the ages. The intent of the paper is to introduce the living-dead character through etymology of the English “vampire” and to present the being through folkloric tradition in its purported European countries of origin. It will also concentrate on specific relevant legends, speculative essays on biological post-mortem phenomena that may have contributed to a pervasive belief in the undead, and an enactment of these features in both the vampire and the demon, as folklorically disparate but contextually transposable characters.
The comparison of the vampire and demon in oral tradition is accomplished in three ways. First, through etymological analysis, the word vampire, with a purposed origin based in the Turkish uber (Slavic upper), will be compared and a likeness will be drawn to the demon character or daman of Greek origin. The linguistic relationship of supernatural beings of oral tradition couples demons and vampires as a single, archetypal etymological unit. This linguistic unification is necessary to further the investigation of the similar roles of the demon/vampire figures in oral tradition, by way of comparative anatomy and comparative action.
This analysis is one that proposes that the vampire is a manifestation of the devil (and other representations of supreme evil) prevalent in many diverse cultures and described through various genres of folklore, most notably, legend and memorate. In such, the preceding inquiries convey how the vampire/demon creature, like many supernatural beings, is transformed through language, image and action to fit specific cultural belief systems in perceived “demonic” classifications.

Adeline Kueh - She-Devils: Pontianak and her sisters in Southeast Asian Popular Culture
Department of Art Theory & Art History, School of Fine Art at LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia.

The paper will cover my ongoing research to critically elaborate and delineate on the ways in which women are represented in Southeast Asian popular culture. To be specific, the various kinds of female ghosts in Southeast Asian popular imagination - from historical and discursive constructions and presentations of pontianak (female ghost/vampire) and her sisters - will be examined by looking at the various constructions/manifestations of monstrosity in visual culture (folklore, visual arts, and film).
The pontianak refers to a woman who had died during or after childbirth who then becomes a female vampire. She is cursed [by] being denied the promise of peace in the kingdom of God (Allah). She is considered unclean, impure as she cannot fulfil her duty as a mother. The curse of immortality descends on her of having to "live" by draining blood from human hosts and not being able to die with the accorded dignity of proper burial rites. The problematics of monsters as border-crossers or that which troubles/escapes categorisations is of particular interest here.
I shall also examine the issue of 'sightings' and 'hauntings' in relation to the functions of folktales, as well as the internalization of social and moral values. The scope will include the manifestations of female vampires from filmic representations of the 1950s and 1960s to the differing contemporary Southeast Asian depictions (in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines).

Philip Bagust - Vampire Dogs and Marsupial Hyenas: Fear, Myth and the Tasmanian Tiger’s Extinction
School of Communication, Information and New Media, University of South Australia, Australia.

The Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), otherwise known as the Marsupial Wolf or more commonly simply as the Thylacine, is today one of the world’s most celebrated ‘recently extinct’ larger mammals, the last specimen having ‘officially’ died as recently as 1936. Since then the animal has never entirely been out of the Australian media and it’s mythology has grown with every alleged sighting and every fruitless search conducted for living animals. In the last few years media interest has risen to fever pitch as scientists from the Australian Museum controversially attempt to clone the animal back into existence using DNA recovered from preserved specimens (see Bagust, 2001).
This paper however, will concentrate on the alleged dietary habits of the animal, and particularly on how this information was used, along with other aspects of its predatory lifestyle, to build a campaign of hatred and fear in 19th century colonial Tasmania that would rival any wolf fable from central Europe. A quote from Eric Guiler (1981) should suffice: “…They used their huge gape to bite out the throat and then they drank the blood…”. Robert Paddle (2000), has researched this indigenous Australian vampire myth and locates its persistence in a mixture of old European werewolf and gothic constructs transported to the new world, and (more prosaically) the persistence and amplification of a few contemporary reports of dubious provenance that made for sensational media coverage which proved useful to those sections of colonial Tasmania society that wanted the animal exterminated.
Finally, this paper also briefly canvases the strange persistence to this day of the ‘extinct’ (or is it?) Thylacine in Bigfoot-like ‘cryptozoological’ myths, not just in Tasmania but on the Australian mainland as well, suggesting that (short of unlikely scenarios where that animal may still exist in the wild) this may well be another case of wilful re-enchantment (to quote ‘The X-Files mantra – “I want to believe”) in an increasingly secular rationalist world.

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