Rose Wellman and Dionisios Kavadias offer a comparative ethnographic study of the evil eye in Iran and Greece. With rich ethnographic detail, the authors convey the ongoing importance of the evil eye as well as the diagnostic approaches and remedies used for removal of this curse. Of particular interest is the way that this complex of notions exists aside from, or sometimes within, orthodox religious practices. Either way, the evil eye conveys a set of concerns related to admiration, envy, and inequality that has played an important role historically, partly because of its ability to continuously update itself to the latest metaphysical constructs.
Edith Turner offers an
excerpt from the preface of her book, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. In the excerpt, she recounts an
incident while doing fieldwork among whale hunters in Alaska when a moment of “collective
effervescence” was generated by the community in an effort to influence
environmental conditions to better support their whale hunting activities.
Alexandra Antohin explores the museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the
U.S. and how exhibitions and tours of religious significance establish active
reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her
experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how
religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’.
She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple
subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception
of religious media in a public context.
Jacqueline Cieslak artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. Cieslak focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.
