- Author(s): Geoffrey Skoll & Maximiliano Korstanje
- When: 2014-03
- Where: Antrocom Online Journal of Anthropology
Undoubtedly, the industry of movies and other cultural entertainments bespeak of us as a society. Many anthropologists have focused on the analysis of cinema as a form of understanding the social fabric. In this vein, this paper not only explores the roots of the Walking Dead, a cablevision series that captivated a much broader audience, but also connects in the worldview of one of the best European philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard. Our thesis is that modernity seemingly jettisoned abject obedience and faith in revelation, though current US political campaigns apparently revert to premodern sensibilities. Modernity relied on human reason and scorned faith. But we have entered a postmodern world in which faith and obedience reappear under slightly different guises, a sort of return of the repressed in psychoanalytic terms. We have a postmodern world. We face it with fear and trembling because we cannot rely on faith. How then are we to understand what exactly we face and how should we respond?