Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece

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Description

This anthropological work thoroughly illustrates the novel synthesis of Christian religion and New Age spirituality in Greece. It challenges the single-faith approach that traditionally ties southern European countries to Christianity and focuses on how processes of globalization influence and transform vernacular religiosity. Based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in Greece, this book demonstrates how the popular belief in the evil eye produces a creative affinity between religion and spirituality in everyday practice. The author analyses a variety of significant research themes, including lived and vernacular religion, alternative spirituality and healing, ritual performance and religious material culture. The book offers an innovative social scientific interpretation of contemporary religiosity, while engaging with a multiplicity of theoretical, analytic and empirical directions. It contributes to current key debates in social sciences with regard to globalization and secularization, religious pluralism, contemporary spirituality and the New Age movement, gender, power and the body, health, illness and alternative therapeutic systems, senses, perception and the supernatural, the spiritual marketplace, creativity and the individualization of religion in a multicultural world.

Reviews

In this fascinating book, Eugenia Roussou captures how energy has become a bridge connecting traditional Greek conceptions of the evil eye with New Age spiritualities. This contribution to the anthropology of religion captures the dimensions of a Greek vernacular religiosity, still influenced by Greek Orthodox Christianity, yet spanning beyond it. * Charles Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University College London, UK *
Reflecting more than a decade of anthropological work, this is a meticulously researched, eloquently written and deeply personal ethnography about the lived religion of contemporary Greece. It sheds new light into the everyday practices of Greeks and connects these practices with the broader cross-cultural currents of New Age religiosity as well as the scholarly research on the multiple meanings of spirituality in different cultures. * Victor Roudometof, Associate Professor, University of Cyprus, Cyprus *

Author Bio

Eugenia Roussou is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal.