Evil eye

Common culture is the basis of exact identification of nations and the manner of their distinctions from others. Cultural and social beliefs are inseparable parts of human lives as they always lived with human beings right from their creation. In a way that even today a number of beliefs of civilized people, with regard to a chain of appropriate or inappropriate rites and ceremonies, have roots in ancient days. As such, identifying and presenting an exact analysis could be possible only through the investigation of past cultures of different people and nations. A common and deep belief among human being is evil eye that too has an ancient precedence. Documents acquired from cave paintings, medieval historical records and number of repelled witchery stones narrate and confirm the prevalence of this particular belief among people through centuries and ages. The present paper tries to respond to the question that whether evil eye being one of the ancient cultural beliefs of our people prevailed among other nations around the world, too? In case of its prevalence, whether or not religious sources confirm it? As such, the authors have tried to study ancient people and important world religions in order to reach to conclusion. They finally came to the point that different religious sources—including Islamic ones confirm the prevalence of witchcraft/evil eye among nations and people around the world.

Many studies on L1 and/or L2 pragmatic competence are constrained by universalist orientations towards sociopragmatics and overlook the idiosyncratic cultural scripts and schemas of underexplored languages and cultures. Particularly neglected is the complicating role of Iranian cultural schema of a (dis-)belief in the evil eye with regards to the speech act of complimenting (and responding to it); actually, the schema is hypothesized (Talebzadeh & Rajabi, in preparation; Younesi & Talebzadeh, 202) to pose intricate interactional challenges for both parties due to the possible interpretations of and (non-)verbal responses to compliments (as predominantly Face-Saving Acts versus potentially Face-Threatening Acts). Moreover, still unknown is the way these could confound EFL learners’ cross-cultural communications. To address these gaps, we present the second phase of a more comprehensive study of compliment response (CR) behaviors of Iranian respondents while checking the adequacy of our proposed model (inspired by Herber’s taxonomy). To qualitatively and quantitatively examine the CRs of fifteen proficient Iranian female learners of English, we initially collected the data using two sets of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) (in Persian and English) consisting of a variety of situations and variables (e.g., social distance and compliment topics). Then, follow-up semi-structured interviews were conducted to tap into the participants’ (non-)beliefs in the evil eye and its presupposed effects on their compliment exchanges. The findings underscore the adequacy of our modified model and the particularities of Iranian cultural schemas. Specifically, being a widespread belief, evil-eye is shown to play a pivotal role in formulating the responses to compliments through the selective application of CR types such as Cheshm-Zadan and Taarof in reaction to the compliments given (particularly those on family members or beloved ones) across both languages. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings with reference to the relevant literature and implications for intercultural communication, language education, and sociopragmatic research and practice.