History hidden in a children’s game (Part 1)
In the far south of Santa Catarina Island, nestled between steep hills and the blue bay, twenty small children prepare a performance for their parents and grandparents. Heads and torsos appear above colorful costumes made of papier-mâché and fabric: Bento is inside a red ox; a friend inside a toucan and another inside a vulture. There's a cowboy whose body pokes through a wild horse; a goat, and the emblematic creature of the Boi de Mamão : the Bernunça. Half dragon and half alligator with an immense mouth to devour children, the Bernunça comes to life with four girls inside it. A second Bernunça is smaller, its tail is animated by the class teacher.
A Boi de Mamão puppet… with out cat Amora playing inside it.
The "Boi de Mamão " (Papaya Ox) is a symbol of the popular culture of the coast of Santa Catarina: it's a community game (brincadeira) that brings neighbors together during June festivals, neighborhood events, and in schools. It incorporates costumes and theater with musical narratives to become a participatory and inclusive performance. Traditionally, it is practiced by adults, but now many schools or children 's community groups perform the "Boi": the "Boi da NEIM da Caeira da Barra do Sul" is one of the first performed by little kids: these are 2-6 years old.
As the centerpiece of the school festival, the Boi de Mamão drew the attention of the entire Barra neighborhood: more than a hundred fathers, mothers, grandparents, and neighbors arrived to watch the spectacle on a Friday afternoon. Some children played their roles with the enthusiasm and comedic timing of born actors; others displayed the charming shyness of some three-year-olds. Younger siblings emerged from the audience to dance and sing with their older brothers and sisters..
And while I laughed and applauded with the children's families, I realized for the first time the power of Boi de Mamão: not only as the folklore of the island, but as a way of reliving the history of Florianópolis.
If you'll forgive me, I'm going to arrive at the Boi through another archipelago, far from the southern coast of Brazil: In the Bronze Age, many communities, cities, and cultures lived on the islands and lands around the Aegean Sea. According to some scholars, the act that brought together this great diversity of cities, transforming the various peoples of the region into a unified people called Hellas (or Greece), was a poem.
The Iliad tells the story of the war waged by the peoples who would later be called Greeks against Troy: they demanded the return of Helen to her husband, a brutal war that helped to establish machismo as the ethical code of the Western world. Much more interesting than the war itself is the story Homer tells: The Iliad is a mix of many elements, languages, myths, and stories within the same epic. In ancient Greece, each city had its cultural hero or heroine, a real or mythical figure who founded the city or gave it meaning; in the Iliad, all these figures come together to participate in the same struggle. Gods and goddesses, demigods, great warriors … all in the same poem. When a city's hero entered the epic of the Iliad, that city came to consider itself Greek. The poem serves as a pre-modern constitution, marking the participation of different groups as part of a common people.
I'm not from Santa Catarina Island; I didn't grow up with the Boi de Mamão. I came from another country as an adult, and I confess that for many years, I found the Boi de Mamão a mess, a folklore without a coherent story or narrative arc. But while applauding the kids at the Caieira pre-school with their mothers and fathers, I realized my big mistake. The Boi de Mamão is the Iliad of the southern coast of Brazil: its history, its way of bringing together the new inhabitants of the Island, marking their place, and creating a demos (a people).
The narratives of the peoples who inhabited this continent before the European invasion describe many curiosities about the invaders: their clothing, their weapons, their language … but also the horses and oxen they brought on the ships. As in many expressions of Brazilian popular culture, these oxen and horses are the figures that open the show.
The Herald — playing the role of the chorus in Greek theatre — opens the performance, presenting the ox as a playful creature that “dances, frolics, jumps, rolls and is very frisky … [ It] seems like something divine." In many versions of the Boi performance — though not in the one the kids performed that afternoon — a priest comes on stage to interrupt the Herald and condemn this phrase — “something divine” — as a divinization of nature. From its very first moments, the perforce of the Boi is trying to deal with the theological conflicts of colonization, the attempt by the church to repress the spirituality of the indigenous people and enslaved Africans, who did indeed believe that nature was “something divine.”
After the argument between the herald and the priest, the playful ox falls ill and then dies from the evil eye, and the owner sends for the doctor. The doctor is unable to cure the ox — in some versions of the script, he even accuses the owner and the cowboy of getting the ox drunk with cachaça (a type of Brazilian rum) — but then a healer arrives and resurrects the animal where the doctor could not. It is not difficult to see the conflict between popular knowledge and "scientific" and European knowledge in this passage, with the public firmly siding with the healer.
The resurrection of the ox by the healer opens the field for a narrative chaos that always bothered me in the Boi de Mamão: different animals appear — sometimes gorillas, bears, and wolves, a vulture that came to eat from the ox's carcass. The children in Caieira also made a toucan in honor of a baby toucan they cared for at school. In the Boi made at another school, the Pântano do Sul school, children invented a Preá de Moleques do Sul, a small rodent in danger of extinction — it only lives on a nearby islet where many relatives fish. Next, as with all the Boi performances, Maricota arrives — tall, blonde, with long, ungainly arms. Although the figures may be interesting or frightening and their features a true work of art, they do not seem to belong to the same story as the ox.
However, for those who read the Iliad, the experience is not unfamiliar. The confusion of characters is reminiscent of the many stories of heroes waiting on the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy. It was the new animals — toucan, preá — and the creativity of the children and their teachers that showed me that the Boi de Mamão, like Homer's poems, grows and transforms. New groups create new Bois and new ways of performing the ritual. They want to add their own history: their heroes, legends, and confusions: the toucan and the preá are just small examples of a long tradition of adding the issues that bother people at different moments of history.
Little Kids play at Boi de Mamão in the village of Caieira da Barra do Sul.
The Day of Iemanjá
The neighborhood where I live in the south of Florianópolis, Brasil, has gentrified rapidly in the last dozen years: luxurious apartment buildings, closed condominiums, chique restaurants and boutiques. Last night, to my great joy, those new walls served as the sounding box for drums calling people to the beach to give thanks to Iemanjá, the orixá of the ocean.
Thousands of people walked down the main shopping street of Campeche until it opened onto the beach. Many sang in Yoruba, the Nigerian language preserved in afro-Brazilian rituals. Others clapped in the rhythm of the ijexá. Six ogans — drummers and priests in the candomblé and umbanda religions — carried a boat made of banana laves and palm fronds, filled with flowers and a statue of Iemanjá.
As the procession poured onto a beach already starred with hundreds of candles protected from the breeze by low barriers of sand, people ran to the water to throw flowers into the waves. Some — both black and white — were clearly congregants of the local afro-Brazilian religious communities, marked by their white clothes, turbans, or long strings of ceremonial beads. Many more were not: Iemanjá and her rituals have become a part of Brazilian culture that reaches far beyond religion.
The mãe de santo who had organized the procession — a religious leader whose small temple sits behind her house on a dirt road that runs up the hill close to our house — brought the ritual boat into a tabernacle on the beach, where the believers sang and prayed. Then suddenly, the boat — now without the icon of Iemanjá among the flowers — exploded from the tent and was carried down to the beach and launched into the water. Hundreds of people followed the boat into the breakers.
Drums echoed against the beach-font restaurants: a tambor de criola organized by a woman from the norther state of Maranhão; a samba de roda where young dancers would leap into the circle to compete one-on-one with fast, elegant steps. The beach became of happy anarchy of dancing, of rhythms, of children running into the water, building sandcastles, falling asleep exhausted on the beach towels their parents had brought. We ran into one old friend after another: Helena’s music teacher from when she was a little girl, a young actress from our last movie, a young man who makes huge carnaval puppets of bulls and vultures, our representative to the state legislature…
In 2026, middle class Brazil seems to have been tamed into the modern, European world, but something wonderful and magical still lies under that surface: yes, the joy of the drums and the dance, something that now seems lost in the middle class domesticity of the United States and Europe, but also the spontaneity of encounter, an unpretentious being-together on the beach where you chat with old friends or the new conversations in the procession where you make new ones. When one says “ritual” or “procession” in English — even a word like “religion” — it sounds heavy, serious, ponderous. The night’s celebrations for Iemanjá were anything but: they were playful and fun, full of laughter, young dancers flirting, children running in circles as their parents shared a beer or a cachaça.
In his “The work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin famously compared a saint’s processions in an Italian village to the new art of cinema. There is only one icon of the saint, Benjamin insisted. It comes out once a year, carried through the city on a special day by special people under special rules. A movie or a photograph, in contrast, can be reproduced millions of times: it is not limited by place, community, or context. The “special” and controlled art of the saint’s icon, then, gives it a powerful aura, something unique and potent and even magical. When art becomes reproducible and easily available, Benjamin insisted, something fundamental was lost — and something gained: he saw a change for political change in this new way to live art.
I’m not part of a candomblé terreiro, but two days ago I was invited to help build the boat that would carry the icon of Iemanjá to the ocean. As I experienced the hierarchies and prohibitions of the terreiro, Benjamin’s idea of aura made even more sense: I was not allowed to step in certain places, prohibited from sitting in the chairs, permitted to use a knife to cut the palms and banana leaves only outside the temple. Then the procession to the beach, full of drums and ritual chants in a language I do not understand, felt like those saints’ ceremonies in Italian villages. Iemanjá had an aura around her.
At the same time, the procession felt new and wonderful, perhaps even magical. The singer and many drummers stood atop a trio elétrico, a particularly Brazilian kind of truck filled with top-end loudspeakers, designed with carnaval parades in mind. Drones flitted overhead, not police surveillance but the young filmmakers from the terreiro, wanting to document the amazing event they had created for the community. The boat-builders, thinking ecologically, made their ritual barque from materials that would biodegrade quickly. Not to mention that the procession went along a modern shopping street, full of bars and clothing boutiques, not the ancient allies of a medieval city.
But perhaps the most magical part of the event was also the most digital. As the ogans carried the flower-filled boat into the breakers, hundreds and hundreds of people ran after it, their cell-phones held high to record the ritual for their friends, for instagram accounts, for family WhatsApp groups. The low lights of the cell phones mirrored the candles in the beach, a pale reflection of the full moon overhead. Paradoxically, what gave the aura to the event — its sense of importance and joyful weight — was the attempt to digitally reproduce it. Social media is the apotheosis of Benjamin’s reproducible art, something with no aura at all. And yet the creation of content for social media gave the procession the aura of magic and moment that made it something different, something outside the normalcy of the day-to-day.
Spend much time on the internet these days, whether reading news or doom-scrolling social media, and you might start to despair. Last night gave me a glimmer of the reconstruction of hope.
Projects to support intercultural dialogue: #1
In South America, one of the most diverse places on the planet, indigenous cultures have developed unique practices for understanding and relating to other cultural groups (those that represent radical otherness). Rituals and exchanges of various kinds (gifts, song and dance exchanges, commensality) are spaces for dialogue, practices that create space to mark, understand, and overcome polarization in different cultures, creating possibilities and common narratives.
Shine a Light and Usina da Imaginação have collaborated to fund 10 innovative projects to promote dialogue between groups that often wouldn’t have the chance to talk. The "call for small projects to encounter the other" funds activities, rites, research, works of art, and other ways of encountering otherness.
Nonprofit Funding Exchange Podcast
Many nonprofits invest valuable time and money into messaging that never quite connects. In today's episode, Josh Gryniewicz interviews Kurt Shaw about innovative strategies for finding and amplifying the voices that inspire action and change. You'll learn practical techniques for building trust, co-creating stories with community members, and using both fictional and non-fictional narratives to reveal deeper truths that challenge the status quo and create more genuine, transformative communication.
On the Stories for Impact Podcast
Over the last five years, we’ve explored stories with countless scientists whose thoughtful research reveals the way they’re answering big questions and solving big problems. We’ve shared conversations about studies done in labs and out in the field. Well, today’s field is Brazil. The labs are crowded city streets and verdant jungles. And the big question? What happens when you stop fearing and fighting against diversity, and start exploring and embracing difference? The researchers we learn from today, anthropologists Kurt Shaw and Rita da Silva, have found their answers through play — in music, drumming, dance, martial arts, food, ritual, and shared experiences in Brazilian wise, but marginalized, communities.