Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art

by 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. 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.

Genres: Martial Arts, Anthropology

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Kerem Demirtas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bracketing off my enthusiasm for capoeria and my intellectual inclinations towards phenomenology aside, it is a remarkable achievement to write about capoeira without failing to convey its poeticism and at the same invoking with ease the top brass such as Heidegger, Bourdieu, Sartre, Levy strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Althusser, Jorge amado so on and so forth apropos of the narrative at hand. Also considering that as a person who is not very well-versed in neuroanthropology it was very informative without cumbersome terminology.
Nothing short of holistic.
Muito obrigado e um abraço Professor Downey!

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

meu amor, capoeira
o jogo mais bonito do mundo

[Sean Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the key to Capoeira is doing it, not reading about it, books like these are useful to me because they elaborate on key parts of the philosophy that I tend to mess in favor of the more physical parts. Less dry than "Capoeira: Ring of Liberation", this book manages to get a capsule overview of Capoeira and why people do what they do. I particularly liked the section on chamadas and their role. I'd never really gotten them before. This is not a book for learning Capoeira techniques, but it's not a bad one to better understand the mindset.

Side note, while the author tries to be unbiased, there's definitely a thread of Capoeira Angola being superior, at least morally and philosophically, to Capoeira Regional.