Recent years have seen the practice of capoeira accorded greater importance in different fields. In the Brazilian context public policies have been funding projects related to capoeira, and in the international arena capoeira groups have proliferated in many countries around the world, and been used in advertising campaigns targeting a wider public. The remarkable expansion of the practice outside Brazil has been accompanied by a growing interest from academics, anthropologists, historians, sociologists and educators in North America and Europe who see capoeira as a subject of study inviting a wide range of possible interpretations.
Maya Talmon-Chvaicer's book fits into this wave of new interpretations of the history of capoeira. Her focus, she says in the introduction, is to reveal narratives that were suppressed or excluded from history books, in particular the importance and influence of Congolese and Yoruban culture. Therefore throughout the book she suggests connections between the practice of capoeira and rituals and languages of the West and West Central African cultures.
The context of capoeira in the early nineteenth century is analysed with the help of primary sources already well known to scholars: travellers' accounts, images, reports from the Royal Police, and the Brazilian legislation that punished capoeiras. The text is enriched by an intense dialogue with other researchers of the history of capoeira and slavery in colonial Brazil. The transatlantic slave trade between Africa and Brazil is analysed with the aim of identifying the possible provenance of capoeiras in the early nineteenth century and its probable ‘cultural roots’.
Regarding its origins, Talmon-Chvaicer believes that the foundations of capoeira were built through the transatlantic slave trade, by combining West Central African fighting techniques, war dances and combat games that arrived in Brazil. She notes the fragility of the arguments that are used to trace the African origins of capoeira by highlighting the lack of conclusive evidence. Interestingly, she proposes the concept of ‘African games’ to better understand capoeira: according to Congo culture the ‘game’ is incorporated into a philosophy of life, a way of understanding life and to prepare for it. The author analyses capoeira and its surrounding universe, from the etymology of the name, through its rituals, the clothing of its practitioners, the colours used to identify groups, the musical instruments, the songs, the body movements and symbols, all elements linked to supposedly ‘original rituals’, and ‘African’ languages, dances and cosmologies. Based on an Afro-centric bibliography she attempts to find connections between the practice of capoeira and ‘Africa’.
However, Talmon-Chvaicer employs a rather ethnocentric method to approach the Brazilian context, based on a simplistic binary division of Brazilian society into ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, and on the belief in a fundamental ‘dichotomy between the Catholic-Portuguese and the African beliefs that confront each other daily in Brazilian life’ (p. 173). This kind of analysis is rather problematic, since it does not reflect the complexity of Brazilian ‘race’ relations, nor the mixed audience in terms of class and ‘race’ of capoeira regional or capoeira Angola. These weaknesses are particularly apparent in her discussion about the formation of the first capoeira schools in the 1930s and 40s. She implicitly adopts an already widely criticised model, according to which the modality of capoeira regional created by Mestre Bimba is classified as ‘white’, ‘altered’ and ‘impure’ and on the other side the modality of a capoeira Angola, which, according to this vision, has been ‘preserved’ by Mestre Pastinha, and is more ‘original’, practised by ‘Afro-descendents’ that are ‘pure’ and close to its ‘African roots’. The result is a vision of ‘culture’ as a substance capable of maintaining an essence that would remain virtually unchanged through time and space. In her rather oversimplified view, black capoeiristas are the ones that preserve capoeira's African roots, whilst white teachers want to transform it into a martial art.
The interviews with the capoeiristas summarised in the fourth chapter, the way they refused to answer to some of her questions, and the mysticism surrounding their know-how in building a berimbau all show some of the enjoyable moments of ethnographic research as well as the difficulties encountered by researchers that are not well versed in Brazilian capoeira and the Portuguese language in carrying out fieldwork with capoeira groups and their mestres.
The discussion in the fifth chapter provides a fresh look of the meaning of malicia, ginga and its connections with malandragem. As she notes, these elements provide the basis of capoeira practice, and are very difficult to explain. The debate is rich in nuances and nurtured by quotations from others scholars, the voices of capoeira mestres, and the interpretation of capoeira lyrics.
Despite these limitations, Talmon-Chvaicer's book is an interesting contribution to capoeira studies. It has the merit of providing much information and leaving the door open to other researchers and enthusiasts who want to explore new ways and approaches to the Brazilian ‘battle dance’.
