The Labour of History: Kerewo Christianity, Frustrated Modernity, and Historical Consciousness

In this chapter I argue that a pragmatic approach to the study of temporalities, in line with Coleman’s notion of ‘historiopraxy’, problematises the notion that temporal orientations can be qualified by a single characterisation (i.e. Christian). The argument is built around the analysis of the Peace and Reconciliation ceremony, an atonement ritual Kerewo people of Papua New Guinea felt necessary to perform in order to lift the curse cast by their ancestors’ murder of the missionary James Chalmers in 1901. This event, interpreted in local theology as a Christ-like moment of death and rebirth that projected Kerewo people into a Christian modernity, provides a window into the social processes through which temporalities are evoked, crafted, and manipulated. Ultimately, I argue, what the Peace and Reconciliation ceremony (although never performed) aimed at was to address the sense of ‘frustrated modernity’: the failure to materialise those expectations raised by colonial and contemporary development discourses.