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

Capoeira is the most elaborate martial art of the African Diaspora, a spectacular combination of dance, acrobatic kicks, and evasive maneuvers. Typically played as a game in which two players vie to control space, demonstrate superior mobility, and trip, kick, or head-butt each other to the ground at a moment of vulnerability, capoiera resembles a combination of acrobatic dance, slow martial arts sparring, and improvised musical performance. Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on participant observation and more than ten years of apprenticeship in the acrobatic martial art. Rather than treating capoeira on a sociologica or cultural level, this book takes an experience-centered approach towards exploring the effects of the art on a player's perceptions and social interactions outside the roda, the "ring" in which the game is played. The text is innovative by example, demonstrating how an experience-centered analysis and ethnographic apprenticeship might produce rich, compelling understanding of a distinctive cultural world.