Text: The excerpt below is a folk performance describing a student’s superstitious beliefs about eye twitches.

Interviewer: Do you have any folk beliefs of what brings good or bad luck?

Interviewee: This isn’t good or bad luck, but like, if your eye’s twitching it means that someone is thinking about you, so my mom would always come in my room and be like: “ok, name everyone that you think would be thinking about you, and when it stops, that’s the person that is thinking about you.”

Context:

This conversation came from a discussion with a Forms of Folklore USC student. I inquired about different folk traditions that were related to her Romanian heritage, and she responded with the above excerpt. Her Mom is fully Romanian, and she associated the tradition with Romanian folk beliefs. She engaged with the folk belief when young, with her mother initiating a folk ritual, to use the eye twitches to see who was thinking about the ritual participant.

Analysis:

There exists the folk belief about eye twitches, and also the folk ritual performed by the interviewee and her mother. The sign exists as it gives a sense of control over the insecurity of who is thinking about you. This ritual with the interviewee and her Mother allows the folk participant to gain some control over their insecurity, by being able to see if others think of them. It is interesting how muted the knowledge granted from the ritual is. The behavior gives minimal information, only telling if others are thinking about them, not more useful details, like what that person thinks about the folk participant. This outcome is likely because if the folk belief was believed to portray more details, then someone could verify more accurately whether the sign was true. The ritual has to strike a balance between calming the folk participant, and not being too much more detailed, where it might be proven false.