Tag Archives: greek

Greek Compliments

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/30/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

In Greece it is customary that if you give someone a compliment you must immediately spit on them, making a sound like “p-th p-th”

My roommate is half Greek and she learned this tradition from her mother.  She explained that the spitting is to prevent the compliment from going to their head and inflating their ego.

This is interesting because it promotes a humitity above all else.  This custom illuminates a light on a culture which retains a mentality that people are ordinary and must always remember that.  This seems to be particularly strong in Greek culture where they had a theological system where gods were very similar to humans, they experiences human desires and intereacted with humans on a regular basis.  As a result people were very aware that they were less than gods, who weren’t that special to begin with, leading to a humility and a custom that exists to prevent egos from being inflated.

Greek Nightmares

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/30/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

In Greek tradition if you have a bad dream and you tell someone before you eat anything your nightmare will come true.  However the same thing is not true if you have a good dream.  If you tell a good dream before eating in an attempt to make it come true, the gods will see through your trickery and it will not happen.

My roommate is half Greek and she learned this tradition from her mother.

This tradition is interesting because it reaffirms the power of spiritual beings as being above us.  This is humbling in a way and reinforces the idea that mere mortals should never try and outsmart the gods cause they will always be one step ahead.  The tradition is also interesting because it speaks to a very negative aspect of the culture, in this situation no matter what you do, it ends up with nothing good happening.

The tradition seems to also be related to the idea that if you have a wish and you tell it to someone it will not come true, like birthday wishes or wishes on a shooting star.

Greek Traditions: Entering and exiting a building

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/30/14
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

One Greek tradition tells that when you enter a building you should always leave through the same door you entered from.

My roommate is half Greek and she learned this tradition from her mother.  She told me the reason for this tradition was because if you enter from one door and leave through another the string of your life will become tangled.

This is an interesting tradition because it clearly comes from a belief system that is no longer generally accepted by people living in Greece.  The idea that there were strings of our lives is now archaic but the cultural belief lives on, even without the superstitious meaning behind it, showing the power of tradition and the performance of this piece of heritage.

Running of the Bitches

Nationality: USA
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/14
Primary Language: English

This informant is a member of a USC fraternity and I asked him to share some of their traditions or stories he might have.  One I found interesting was about an annual tradition that occurs when the Sororities give out their bids to the new members.

Every year in the Fall sororities have this event where they give bids to the new freshman and they all run from campus to their new houses.  I honestly have no idea why they do it that way but its fuckin awesome for us because we just get to sit back and scope all the new hot girls.  Every semester we all sit in front of the house really drunk and get super rowdy.  The whole time we all judge who got the best pledge class and try to pick out the hottest chicks.

I might add that my informant was drinking a beer while I listened to his story, which is further a testament to the drinking culture amongst fraternities.  I thought this was an interesting story because it shed light on some interesting dynamics between fraternities and sororities.  Frat kids seem to be blatantly disrespecting women, most of them young freshman, which an outsider might find offensive.  However, the sorority girls obviously want to show off their new pledge class to the Greek community and have continued to do so for years.  This shows how the college culture of acceptable cross-gender relations is different from the outside world.

Greek Evil Eye (Object)

Nationality: Canadian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/20/13
Primary Language: English

The informant showed me a piece of jewelry that she recently obtained from an expedition to Greece. It is strung on a very simple rope necklace. The pendant is what is called an “evil eye”. It is a vivid sapphire blue and in the shape of a circle. There is a smaller white circle within the blue stone. Finally, there’s a black dot. It looks like a bullseye target. The stone appears to be made out of some sort of glass, and the blue and white circles within it appear to be paint or a glaze. My informant told me that when she bought it, there were various sizes available – pendants, earrings, rings, and even large versions that you could hang on your door or as room decor.

My informant says that she picked up the item when she was on a cruise in the Mediterranean. She got it at the port in Mykonos at a street vendor, however she recalls seeing the exact same “evil eye” jewelry in Turkey. The store vendor in Turkey claimed it was a Turkish artifact, which may have to do with “Romantic Nationalism”.

My informant tells me that the store vendor says it’s to ward off bad luck.

Analysis: According to Dundes, the evil eye was thought to be the eye of envy – where a person giving someone else a look of envy could put a curse on that person. In Greek superstition, it is said that if someone felt like they were nauseous and had a sense of foreboding, like something bad was going to happen, it had to do with the evil eye curse. In the majority of the research, the curse was thought to be unintentional, and the result of an envious stare. A common practice is Greece and Turkey is to pin an evil eye pendant onto a newborn or a baby in order to protect them from harm. This artifact is actually found in many cities across the Mediterranean, making it hard to pinpoint a specific origin, however the general consensus among researchers is that it started in Greece.

Dundes concludes that the evil eye has to do with fish’s eyes, because they are always moisturized. The evil stare and effects of the evil eye curse come with withering, dehydration, etc, and the blue of the glass symbolizes water and moisture. Therefore it is a way to counteract the evil eye. Another theory that has received research is the theory that you “fight fire with fire”, so you wear an evil eye to neutralize the effects of the evil eye.

Annotation: Dundes, Alan. The Evil Eye: A Casebook. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1992. Print.

http://iscte.pt/~fgvs/Dundes%20Wet.pdf