Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece
Ebook
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.
Examines the rise of new age spirituality in Greece and challenges the stereotype that in southern European countries, religious identity and Christianity go hand-in-hand.
Focuses on a very popular belief globally, that of the 'evil eye', which surprisingly has not attracted the interest of social scientists to date
Offers a novel approach in the field of the anthropology of religion in a southern European context, transcending the stereotype that countries of southern Europe that are mono-religious and not open to global sociocultural and spiritual influences
The first book that examines the relationship between religion and spirituality and the rise of the so-called 'New Age' spirituality in the Greek context
1. Introduction
2. The New Age of Greek Religiosity: Orthodox Christianity and Beyond
3. Matiasma: the Energetic Interplay of Senses and Emotions
4. Ksematiasma: Healing, Power, Performance
5. Creative Syntheses through Material Culture: the Evil Eye in the Spiritual Marketplace
6. The Pluralistic Landscape of Greek Religiosity: Religion and Spirituality at a Global Age
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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.
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.
- Title: Orthodox Christianity, New Age Spirituality and Vernacular Religion: The Evil Eye in Greece
- Author: Eugenia Roussou
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2021
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350152816, 9781350225398, 1350225398, 1350152811
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350152816
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-11T01:18:08Z
Eugenia Roussou is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), ISCTE - University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal.