O feminino no Bumba Meu Boi do Maranhão: linguagens, saberes e fazeres em conexão

Abstract

This study analyzes the role of women in the Bumba Meu Boi of Maranhão, with emphasis on the women known as Amas, seeking to understand their knowledge, practices, and forms of participation in a cultural manifestation historically marked by male predominance. The research is grounded in the recognition of Bumba Meu Boi as an intangible cultural heritage and as a space for the production, circulation, and transmission of knowledge. Within this context, it examines how the knowledge and practices of women involved in Bumba Meu Boi can be recognized as legitimate forms of knowledge and integrated into the context of basic education.The study was conducted in the Tibiri neighborhood, in São Luís, Maranhão, adopting a qualitative approach grounded in oral history, ethnographic contributions, and an epistemological perspective committed to qualified listening and to recognizing women as producers of knowledge. The construction of the narratives was carried out through semi-structured interviews, complemented by audiovisual records and interpreted through thematic analysis, in dialogue with the theoretical framework of popular culture, education, and gender relations, drawing upon the contributions of Delors (1998), Albernaz (2010), and Oyěwùmí (2021).The findings demonstrate that, although women have historically been associated with secondary roles or rendered invisible, their participation is central to sustaining the manifestation, particularly with regard to organization, the transmission of knowledge, and the continuity of cultural practices. The trajectories analyzed, especially those of the interlocutors, reveal that women's participation in Bumba Meu Boi occurs through processes of permanence, resistance, and negotiation, highlighting tensions between recognition and naturalized gender inequalities within the tradition.The analysis also indicates that the knowledge produced within the sphere of popular culture has historically received little recognition in the educational field, creating a context characterized not by the absence of women's voices, but by the absence of qualified listening. Thus, the study demonstrates that the challenge lies not in the lack of female voices, but in the persistence of institutional and social mechanisms that have historically rendered such knowledge invisible and illegitimate.In this sense, the research emphasizes the need to recognize women as producers of knowledge whose experiences and practices can contribute to the development of contextualized pedagogical proposals. As an outcome of the study, an educational product was developed in the form of a didactic sequence designed for basic education, with the purpose of integrating the knowledge embedded in Bumba Meu Boi into the school curriculum. It is concluded that women's participation in Bumba Meu Boi not only ensures the continuity of this cultural tradition but also reveals processes of reconfiguration of gender relations, reaffirming the importance of recognizing their knowledge as legitimate forms of knowledge within both the cultural and educational fields, thereby contributing to the strengthening of educational practices committed to valuing memory, popular culture, and the epistemologies produced by women.