Week 4

In the fourth week of class, we talked about "The Evil Eye", and what we learned about the Evil Eye was that it basically was used in terms of "jealousy". From my understanding in class, if you got the Evil Eye that means you were envious of someone that has something that you don't, and that it is a sort of "metaphor" for experiencing that type of envy. We also learned that this Evil Eye was seen as an illness of some sort. Meaning if someone is suspected to have or has the Evil Eye, they would then be classified as "sick" and thus treated for the disease with its cure.

This really interested me because in Mexican culture (my culture), we also have something that we refer to as "el ojo malo" (the evil eye). Except in this context, you show the "evil eye" to a newborn baby, which is the worst thing you can do. To be more clear, when a woman has a baby, you must allow everyone who wants to hold the baby hold them. And this being because if you do not let someone hold your baby/if the baby does not want to be held, then that person who wanted to hold the baby will become upset and look at the newborn with an "evil eye".  And once this person looks at the baby with the "evil eye" the baby then becomes uneasy, constantly cries, and throws up. The way to avoid this is by tying a red ribbon around the baby's wrist before shown at a revealing party.

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