Rhetorics of a cultural syndrome: verbal treatments against 'mal de ojo' in Spain

Folk illnesses are diseases widespread within a specific culture but not recognised by official medicine. Since the 16th century, in Spain there has been 'mal de ojo' (evil eye), whose psycho-physical malaise, incurable by traditional medicine, is attributed to the fact that a person may, intentionally or not, hurt someone by talking or thinking about him/her with envy (Baer et alii, 2006). Among the treatments, passed down orally by 'entendidas', there are specifically-created prayers (Salvador, 2015). This folk illness has been previously studied from a medical-anthropological standpoint (Erkoreka, 2014). This intervention focuses on a new perspective on the matter: the power assumed by words, whose semantics is enriched with a pragmatic function, transforming this kind of rhetoric into the instrument of cure. For this reason, the macro-linguistic, linguistic and semantic analysis of some prayers reported in various anthropological studies on the subject (Leblic, 1977; Blasquez, 1986; Salillas, 2000 and others) is proposed. The analysis focuses on the macro-structure of prayers (stanzas, verses) and each individual stanza from phonetic (rhymes, musicality, sound rhetorical figures), syntactic, lexical (dialectalisms, verb tenses, syntactic rhetorical figures) and semantic (content, themes, recurring symbols and characters, semantic rhetorical figures, culturally-specific elements) point of view, taking into consideration the influence of the pragmatic purpose and the oral context (Díaz, Sevilla, 1980; López, 2005; Salvador, 2015). In the field of medical humanities, this study can contribute to expanding knowledge of the medical-anthropological and culturally-specific phenomenon of 'mal de ojo' by offering a linguistic perspective.