Sou bravo, sou forte, sou filho do Norte: a construção discursiva do indígena no Bumba meu boi de Morros - MA

Abstract

Bumba Meu Boi is a cultural manifestation rooted in the symbolic and social life of the people of Maranhão. A vibrant, dynamic, and performative popular expression that articulates memory, identity, and resistance. In this celebratory dimension, the Bumba Meu Boi of Morros – MA operates as a place for the production of discourses and the contestation of meanings. In this scenario, the indigenous figure is discursively constructed. It goes beyond a scenic adornment; this character carries a symbolic density that evokes collective memory and acts on the tensions between tradition and transformation.Understanding the meanings produced by indigenous peoples implies analyzing how discourses manifest themselves, simultaneously revealing strategies of resistance. In the Bumba Meu Boi of Morros – MA, we analyze the place that indigenous people occupy within this group and the construction of meanings, considering how this place is discursively produced. We start from the principle that the indigenous person is discursively constructed, being constantly re-signified. Given this scenario, the present research is guided by the following question: “How is the i Bumba Meu Boi is a cultural manifestation rooted in the symbolic and social life of certain localities in the state of Maranhão. It is a vibrant, dynamic, and performative popular expression that articulates memory, identity, and resistance. In this celebratory dimension, the Bumba Meu Boi of Morros – MA operates as a place for the production of discourses and the contestation of meanings. In this scenario, the indigenous person is discursively constructed. They go beyond a mere scenic adornment; this character carries a symbolic density that evokes collective memory and acts within the tensions between tradition and transformation. Understanding the meanings produced by the indigenous person implies analyzing how discourses manifest themselves, simultaneously revealing strategies of resistance. In the Bumba Meu Boi of Morros – MA, we analyze the place that the indigenous person occupies in this group and the construction of meanings, considering how this place is discursively produced. We start from the principle that the indigenous person is discursively constructed, being constantly re-signified. Given this scenario, the present research is guided by the following question: "How is the indigenous person discursively constructed in the Bumba Meu Boi of Morros – MA?", taking as its starting point the theme of 2024 "It is necessary to be born again". We consider the relationship of this discursive construction with the narrative of the Boi-Bumbá festival. To this end, we chose as the corpus of our research the audiovisual recording of one of the 2024 performances, considering that these materials allow for a multifaceted analysis, integrating oral, visual, and symbolic elements. The selection of Boi de Morros is justified by its recognition as a group that is positioned, by its own participants, as a place of innovation within the festival, both for the contemporary themes it addresses and for the striking presence of muscular bodies prepared for the performance, which consequently communicates meanings and values. To support this research, we adopted Materialist Discourse Analysis (MDA), mobilizing concepts such as subject, ideology, discursive memory, interdiscourse, discursive formation, and ideological formation, in order to understand the slippages, the displacements of meanings, and the reverberations of discourse that manifest themselves in the construction of the indigenous in this manifestation. To this end, we rely primarily on the work of Michel Pêcheux (1993, 1995, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2017), Eni Orlandi (2007, 2011, 2012, 2015), Indursky (2011, 2013), Silva Filho (2021), as well as researchers who reinforce this same theoretical perspective.