Learning Capoeira

Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art

Greg Downey

Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art is a provocative look at capoeira, a demanding acrobatic art that combines dance, ritual, music, and fighting style. Based on author Greg Downey's extensive research and more than ten years of apprenticeship, this ethnographic study looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players' perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the "ring" where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives.

Learning Capoeira

Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art

Greg Downey

Description

Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art is a provocative look at capoeira, a demanding acrobatic art that combines dance, ritual, music, and fighting style. First created by slaves, freedmen, and gang members, capoeira is a study in contrasts that integrates African-descended rhythms and flowing dance steps with hard lessons from the street. According to veteran teachers, capoeira will transform novices, instilling in them a sense of malicia, or "cunning," and changing how they walk, hear, and interact.
Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey's extensive research about capoeira and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players' perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the "ring" where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives. He brings together an experience-centered, phenomenological analysis of the art with recent discoveries in psychology and the neurosciences about the effects of physical education on perception. The text is enhanced by more than twenty photos of capoeira sessions, many taken by veteran teacher, Mestre Cobra Mansa.
Learning Capoeira breaks from many contemporary trends in cultural studies of all sorts, looking at practice, education, music, nonverbal communication, perception, and interaction. It will be of interest to students of African Diaspora culture, performance, sport, and anthropology. For anyone who has wondered how physical training affects our perceptions, this close study of capoeira will open new avenues for understanding how culture shapes the ways we carry ourselves and see the world.

Learning Capoeira

Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art

Greg Downey

Preface
Prelude: Playing Capoeira
1. Inside and Outside the Roda
The Development of Capoeira
Black Culture in Brazil
Mobilizing the Black Community
Resisting Sociology, Structures, and Symbols
A Phenomenological Turn in Ethnography
Plan of the Book
PART 1: LEARNING
2. The Significance of Skills
A Capoeira Class
Skill and Sensitivity
Learning to Walk
The Body's Role in Experience
Learning to Fall
3. Following in a Mestre's Footsteps
The Advent of the Academy
Moving like a Mestre
Imitative Learning
Coaching the Bananeira
Coaching and Developing Skills
Apprenticeship as a Research Method
PART 2: REMEMBERING
4. History in Epic Registers
A Notorious History of Outlaws
The Bambas of Bahia
The Closing of the "Heroic Cycle"
The Long Struggle for Liberation
African Origins and Slave Resistance
The Tragic Life and Death of Mestre Pastinha
Alternative Histories
How Histories are Heard
5. Singing the Past into Play
The Song Cycle
Singing Commentary on the Game
Mortal Seriousness and Prayer
Shifting "I" Across Time
Ambiguous Times in Song
Playing in a Poetic Projection
PART 3: PLAYING
6. Hearing the Berimbau
The Capoeira Orchestra
Musical Interactions
The Grain of the Berimbau
Listening with a Musician's Hands
Hearing with a Player's Body
The Social Ability of Hearing
Hearing as a Skill
7. Play with a Sinister Past
Reminders of the Past
The Importance of the Chamada
The Chamada's Dramatic Dynamic
Play and Implied Violence
The Sinister Gravity of Play
A Sense of Tradition
PART 4: HABITS
8. The Rogue's Swagger
The Ginga
Fundamentals of Cunning
The Despised Waist
A Swaying Stride
Posture and Self-Transformation
Crying at an Adversary's Feet
9. Closing the Body
Becoming Aware of One's Openness
The Impossibility of Closing
Opening an Adversary
Closing the Body in Candomblé
Signing the Cross
Gesture, Posture, and Vulnerability
10. Walking in Evil
Hard Jokes and Cautionary Tales
Dissembling in a Treacherous World
The Sideways Glance
Seeing Through Shifty Eyes
A Cunning Comportment
PART 5: CHANGES
11. The Limits of Whitening
The Emergence of Capoeira Regional
Critics of Capoeira Regional
Bimba's Students and "Whitening"
Whitening in Brazil
Changes in Movement Style
Capoeira from Middle-Class Bodies
12. Tearing Out the Shame
Hands, Head, and Legs
Working with Bodies
Reviving Capoeira Angola
Broken Movements, Softened Bodies
Shame and Its Removal
Moved to Change
Conclusion: Lessons from the Roda
Physical Education as Ethnographic Object
The Pragmatism of Practice
Embodiment and Experience
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Learning Capoeira

Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art

Greg Downey

Reviews and Awards

"This book is about the changes students undergo as they learn the art. The results are striking. Using phenomoenolgical analysis, exploring physiological memory, and the tried and true personal anecdotes, Downey offers testimony that academia's shift to the personal has benefits."--Joshua M. Rosenthal. Latin American Research Review