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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, capoeria is a study in contrasts that integrates African-descended rhythms and flowing dance steps with hard lessons from the street. According to veteran teachers, capoeria will transform novices, instilling in them a sense of malicia, or 'cunning,' and changing how they walk, hear, and interact.

Learning Capoeria is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey's extensive research about capoearia and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditonal capoeria teachrs 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, phienomenological 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.

Learnging 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 understadning how culture shapes the ways we carry ourselves and see the world.

Greg Downey is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. He began studying and practicing capoeira in 1992; did field research on the art in Salvador, Brazil, from 1993 to 1995; and trained extensively again from 1998 to 2000 while living in New York City. A veteran dance and capoeira instructor as well as a martial artist, he was originally drawn to capoeira because it combined aspects of both dance and fighting style. Dr. Downey also writes about physical education, performance arts, combat sports, and ethnomusicology.

Contents

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
Learing to walk
The body's role in expeirence
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 capoeria 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 teh 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
Fudnamentals of cunningThe deispise waist
A swaying stride
Posture and self-transformation
crying at an adversarys feet
9 Closing the body
Becoming aware of one's openness
The impossibility of closing
Opening an adversary
Closing the body in Candomble
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
Prat 5: Changes
11 The limits of whitening
The emergence of capoeira regional
Critiques of capoeira regional
Bimba's students and 'Whitening'
Whitening in Brazil
Changes in movement style
Capoeria from middle-class bodies
12 Tearing out the shame
Hands, head, and legs
Working with bodies
Reviving capoeria 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
… (mere)
 
Markeret
AikiBib | May 29, 2022 |
I might have learned a little bit of "malícia" from this book, but I mostly learned the difference between capoeira Angola and capoeira Regional; about the background and practice of this game-cum-martial art; and about how the development of a physical art interacts with the psychological and social changes that a practitioner also undergoes, willy-nilly.

Mostly I read it to find out a bit about Brazilian culture that I'd only seen bits of. On that score, definite success. It won't tell you how to become a capoerista (though it might give you a bit of a yen to do so), mind you.… (mere)
 
Markeret
comixminx | Apr 5, 2013 |

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Værker
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