University of Cambridge
A Ritual Aesthetics of Loss and Memory among the Boe (Bororo)
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThe Boe people of Central Brazil, widely known in the ethnographic record as Bororo, live today in small forested reserves amidst a vast landscape of cattle farms and soya plantations. Despite dramatic transformations in their physical and human surroundings, the Boe continue to practise intricate and extended mortuary ritual cycles. Alongside mourning deceased kin, these funerals evoke another perceived loss: the decline of ritual life itself, also equated with ‘culture’ as such. This thesis examines how Boe ritual practice shapes personal experiences of time, memory, and affect, while also turning those experiences into a reflexive awareness of how people collectively situate themselves in time. I document how the created sense of collective loss is not a matter of longing for abandoned practices or forgotten tradition, but is internally generated in rituals that recursively frame themselves as diminished echoes of a once-vibrant past. This study thus approaches the Boe mortuary cycle as a technology of memory, tracing how senses of loss, nostalgia, compassion, and broader experiences of time are both evoked and shaped through its aesthetic forms. While such experiences are intimately tied to the making and remaking of a particular form of kinship with the dead as figures of pastness, they also generate far-reaching effects among the living. I trace how these affective states are not merely passive or melancholic, but generatively transform persons and relationships, and ground reflexive reassessments of how one ought to live as Boe today. Loss and nostalgia are shown not to prompt a retreat from the present, but to actively shape it and open pathways to possible futures — revealing a subtle entanglement between mourning and futurity. Boe mortuary ceremonies are therefore woven into the fabric of contemporary life, being driving forces of how people live, grieve, and relate in the present. I unfold this argument across five chapters. Chapter One situates Boe mortuary ceremonies within the broader spatial, historical, and political context of Tadarimana village, where my fieldwork was carried out. Chapter Two introduces a key Boe ritual pairing of the affects of compassion and longing, by examining the feeding relationship between the lead mourner (known as ‘mother of souls’) and the deceased’s soul. Chapter Three carries this analysis outward into a wider relational aesthetics between performers and audience at large, construed as the living and the dead. Overall, this aesthetics defines how everyone ought to relate to and remember the dead. Chapter Four explores the pervasive sense of loss evoked by Boe ritual, focusing on ritual singing and wailing as these are practiced and reflected upon in the context of the emergence of a new generation of male ritual specialists. The final chapter considers how the adoption of the Christian Heaven in Boe eschatology, traced through ritual practice, history, cosmology, and mythology, expresses a specific form of historicity.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Caldeira De Andrada, João Kelmer
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Stasch, Rupert
Subjects
dc:subject × 7Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122278
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/390948