In this article I intend to discuss a social drama ("falling in the cane") which marks the passage to an ambiguous and liminal social condition. If "modernism" has to do with living in different times and spaces simultaneously, certainly the "bóias-frias" are our "modernist" comtemporaries. Paradoxacally, considering that we are dealing with a tensio-packed image which certainly seduced intellectual groups during the seventies and eighties, we may venture to inquire whether the attempts to define the "bóia-fria", tuning image into category, contributed to the formation of a sort of recent fossil of academic production.
"Bóia-fria"; time; space; dialectical image; ritual