Testimonial Practice: The Narrative Blending of Self and Other, Mundane and Supernatural

• In Event: 341 - Section on Sociology of Religion Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Religion and Gender

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the workings of the testimonial practice of a brotherhood of charismatic Christian businessmen in Mexico City. It undertakes a close examination of one of the brotherhood’s training sessions on testimony, and in doing so it shows what the testimony is from brothers’ perspective: the sharing of a story from one’s life that allows the listener, through a combination of identification and transmission of a feeling of the supernatural, to feel the possibility of another life. The brothers’ discussion of their ideas about how testimony works and their experience with doing it suggests that testimony practice is powerful in part because it is a narrative practice that blends and blurs the lines between self and other, mundane and supernatural.

Author

• Graham Wilson Hill, University of Bern