Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change

psychotherapy makes, and probably requires—about how to find things out, and what there is to find out—do not appear to me suitable for ethnographic research, which is how Souvlakis describes his research. It is sometimes impossible to escape the suspicion that one of the subtexts here is a defensive rebuttal of the notion that modern Corfiots are still superstitious. Having said that, Chapters Two and Three, the heart of the book, in which Souvlakis reports and draws upon his extensive interviews, focus groups, and conversations about the evil eye with lay people, Orthodox clergymen, folk healers, and mental health practitioners in Corfu, are, if you are interested in modern ‘supernatural belief’, very worth exploring. There are questions one might want to pose about the nature and status of some of this material as presented on the page, particularly about its editing and interactional context. On occasions it looks just a little too tidy and polished, which is, I know, a common shortcoming of ethnography. However, these questions should not be allowed to detract from the value and interest of his evidence. It is hard to think of a comparable body of evidence from anywhere else, and to those of us who are interested in such matters, publication of this material is of great value. Unfortunately, this praise must be tempered by the erosion of confidence that careless editing and poor scholarship cannot help but encourage. Leaving aside the rather remarkable fact that one will search in vain for a useful working definition of the book’s subject matter, consider the following selection: the index is six pages, give or take, out of synch with the text; there are notable absences from the discussion of the literature such as Joost A. M. Meerlo’s (admittedly eccentric) Intuition and the Evil Eye (1971), Edward S. Gifford’s The Evil Eye: Studies in the Folklore of Vision (1958) (although a 1960 paper is cited), and, strangest of all, Charles Stewart’s Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (1991); on pages 4–5 Michael Sharmer is referred to as Shermer, and the publication date of his book, Why People Believe Weird Things, is given as 1998, rather than 1997 (which maybe a confusion with Sharma 1998); on page 31 there is a mystifying reference to Wirt’s ‘extensive fieldwork in one of the Scottish Gaelic regions of Italian villages’; and I could add more. So, for the reasons that I have set out, Evil Eye in Christian Greek Orthodox Society is a work that is to be read with caution and an appropriately critical eye. However, the qualitative research data about Corfu and its people make it more than worth the effort.