“Cordelia, you sound so different”: The construction of the self and the perspective of present in a narrative of religious conversion

Abstract

From a sociointeractional perspective of discourse (Gumperz, 1982), this research aims at investigating the construction of the narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1990) that is brought out in the discursive production of a story of religious conversion taking into consideration the perspective of present time (Jarvinen, 2004; Bastos e Santos, 2006). The narratives of conversion have very particular characteristics, such as working as testimonies of the passage from one bad condition of existence to a better one, in which the contrast between present and past are especially visible. In this paper, I investigate parts of a conversion narrative of a woman who has experienced conversion to an evangelical church (of which she is a member at the moment of the interview) after having participated in other religious practices. The research points to the fact that, when narrating different moments of her past experiences, the narrator realizes different identity constructions of herself, such as being superficial in her adolescence, troublesome in the relationship with her family and unhappy in her adulthood. According to her view of the present time, these constructions work, in the general schema of her narrative, as counterpoints to the construction of her present identity (after the conversion) as a happy and confident woman. Key words: interactional sociolinguistics, social identity, narrative and religious discourse.