The Evil Eye: A Casebook

Alan Dundes was a folklorist, and this Garland Publishing volume is an edited academic casebook he assembled, collecting scholarship on evil eye belief as it appears across many different cultures and historical periods. Its strength is comparative range achieved through genuine specialist contributions rather than one editor's own generalization, letting a reader see how a broadly similar belief in a harmful gaze takes distinct local forms across the traditions represented. Its limit, as with any edited casebook, is that its individual essays vary in depth, period and approach depending on each contributor's own specialization, so a claim about evil eye belief in one specific culture is best checked against the essay addressing that culture directly rather than treated as representative of every tradition the collection surveys.