Fátima and the Referendum: Pilgrimage as Temporal Work in Bougainville Politics

How are transcendental temporalities and powers mobilised and used to shape the world we live in? This chapter focuses on how in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea transcendental powers have been invoked to mobilise political change in a highly diversified society. After an almost decade-long civil war (1988–1998) and an equally long peacebuilding process, Bougainvilleans could finally decide upon their political future through a referendum held at the end of 2019. However, Bougainville’s futurity—its becoming and desired metamorphosis—seems to be hampered due to people’s subjective memory of the troubling past. The chapter shows how the performance of Catholic pilgrimages united people from different regions, denominations, and political affiliations, momentarily moving away from traumatic and conflicting-lived temporalities. As argued, pilgrimages work both temporally and spatially through repetition, remediation, and movement, thereby enabling believers to commemorate and mobilise the divine, and move away from individual pasts and passive presents towards a communal new future.