Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on how imaginings of the independent future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea seem to be hampered due to people’s subjective memory of the troubling past.

Paper long abstract:

How can we imagine a future when we are locked into a traumatic past that determines our present? This presentation focuses on how imaginings of the independent future of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea seem to be hampered due to people’s subjective memory of the troubling past. While those grown up and born during the conflict cannot envision a time before the conflict, nor the time of the ancestors, the older generation can. As a result, the latter generation’s desire to re-create a pre-conflict Bougainville sociality has no resonance among a large part of Bougainville’s current population. Moreover, although the conflict is officially over, for many, especially male ex-combatants and those traumatised by the crisis, the conflict has not ended and they still live with it, which constitutes a kind of anti-temporality. This presentation shows how at the eve of the Bougainville referendum in 2019, the performance of Catholic pilgrimages united people from different genders, regions, denominations and political affiliations, momentarily moving away from traumatic and conflicting lived temporalities. As argued, these pilgrimages enabled participants to commemorate, mobilize and hence perform the divine, and (albeit temporarily) move away from their individual pasts and passive presents towards the envisioning of a communal and peaceful new future.