The performance of time in Bumba Meu Boi: connections between the Boi and the Miolo

Abstract

This article analyzes how the performance of Bumba meu boi in Maranhão actualizes different temporalities in the present, articulating history, myth, and ritual through relationships among bodies, materials, and expressive forms. The argument focuses on the relationship between the boi, a fabricated body that occupies the center of the celebration, and the miolo, the performer who inhabits and moves it, in order to understand how this connection produces particular forms of presence, agency, and experiences of time. The analysis brings together historical and travel accounts, specialized literature, iconographic records, and ethnographic data produced during fieldwork in Cururupu, Maranhão. I argue that performance does not merely represent or recall the past, but makes it operate in the present through bodies, objects, gestures, sounds, and ritual cycles. The relationship between boi and miolo also reveals a productive instability at the boundaries between human and nonhuman, body and artifact, life and death. By following these transformations, the article proposes understanding Bumba meu boi as a practice in which different temporalities do not merely coexist but are continuously actualized, transmitted, and transformed.