Acessibilidade / Reportar erro

“God gives a second chance”: suffering and remaking worlds in religious testimonies

Abstract

Religious testimony is a genre of life storytelling structured in a language of feelings. It explores the “inner life” of the convert through the public exposure of his torments. From the analysis of the testimonies of women artists converted to pentecostalism, the article is intended to accompany the process of constitution of sufferers who pass through their narratives. Suffering is a native category triggered to qualify negative emotional states and is articulated with expressions such as “pain”, “emptiness” and “anguish”. I propose in this work a theoretical approach that seeks to reveal the temporalities that exist in the construction of these evangelical sensibilities. It seeks to explain the strategies that such artists find to deal with the pains of daily life and to try an existential recovery of self after passing through tortuous subjective experiences, what I will call based on the anthropological literature of “remaking a world”.

Keywords:
testimonies; social suffering; religious conversion; gender

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social - IFCH-UFRGS UFRGS - Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500 - Prédio 43321, sala 205-B, 91509-900 - Porto Alegre - RS - Brasil, Telefone (51) 3308-7165, Fax: +55 51 3308-6638 - Porto Alegre - RS - Brazil
E-mail: horizontes@ufrgs.br