Testimonios as Autobiography. Daily Life and Beliefs among the Wichí in the Argentine Chaco

My purpose is to examine the complexity of the experience of “conversion” through certain narratives. Some of these stories are part of the traditional canon called pahchehen. Others are overlapping tales dealing with socalled “conversion” and today are recounted as Wichí versions of “believing,” called testimonios, by men and women who belong to congregations of differing Christian denominations. Biographical accounts involve a suite of ethical and methodological issues that we shall not examine here. For the Wichí, the focus of such portrayals on autobiographical detail and personal experiences is neither a habitual nor conventional model. Rather, their traditional narratives tell of myths, or pahlalis, and of casos, or pahchehen. In her La Mascara Cultural, Dasso notes three distinct aspects of casos/pahchehen: the first is that they shape and direct experience into a narrative form, thereby mak- ing it a “communicable entity like a story”; next they exhibit an “inten- tional and demiurgical character” by which the word reproduces through the narrative process a reality that becomes actual in the telling; and last that they feature a narrator who speaks about and points out the possible occurrence of events in the Wichí world. While the narrator can be the main character to whom the event has formally happened, it is the narra- tive act itself that makes the occurrence of the event possible even in other cultural contexts. The casos/pahchehen are even now widely employed to enable listeners to be part of events that have occurred in various ambits of daily and spiritual life so as to make them familiar with particular inci- dents or circumstances of the natural, social and moral order that have been experienced or experimented or are known to have occurred. They are the medium of a message whose formal telling is a well sign-posted path or nayik.