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http://qix.sagepub.comQualitative Inquiry
DOI: 10.1177/1077800405284370 2006; 12; 316 Qualitative
Inquiry
Neil Stephens and Sara Delamont : Embodied Ethnographic
UnderstandingBerimbauBalancing the
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10.1177/1077800405284370Qualitative InquiryStephens, Delamont /
Balancing the Berimbau
Balancing the BerimbauEmbodied EthnographicUnderstanding
Neil StephensSara DelamontCardiff University, Wales
This article is an unusual reflexive text. It has two authors,
two voices, twoembodied experiences, and two sociological
biographies in dialogue. Theempirical focus is capoeira, but the
ethnographic experience is common tomany cultural forms. Capoeira
is the Brazilian dance and martial art, done tothe music of the
berimbau. Classes are offered in many European countries, aswell as
in North America. Two sociologists, one a practitioner, the other a
sed-entary observer, collaborate to study what attracts students
outside Brazil tocapoeira, how it is taught to non-Brazilians, and
how the classes and socialevents are enacted and understood. The
dualities of the collaborative andcontrastive engagements are
explored in this article, which focuses on how todo fieldwork on an
embodied skill. Physical activity, musical apprenticeship,and a
multilingual environment are all made problematic in their
collaborativereflections.
Keywords: capoeira; embodiment; dialogic text; dialogic
fieldwork;autobiography
316
Qualitative InquiryVolume 12 Number 2April 2006 316-339
2006 Sage Publications10.1177/1077800405284370
http://qix.sagepub.comhosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Authors Note: We, Trovao and Bruxa, are grateful to all the
instructors we have trained underand observed, especially Claudio
Campos (Achilles), Perseus, Andromeda, Tireseus, Ajax,Patrokles,
Ulysses, and Cadmus. We have enjoyed the company of all the
disciples in all theclasses and displays that we have attended. All
the names in the article, except ours andClaudios, are pseudonyms:
The teachers are Greek heroes, and the students have nicknamesfrom
Kiplings Jungle Book because no capoeira student we have ever met
had a nickname fromthat source. If there is a real Mowgli or Baloo
practicing capoeira, we apologize. RosemaryBartle Jones word
processed the article, for which we are very grateful. We owe a
debt to RodrigoRibeiro, who has occasionally plunged into capoeira
classes and rodas in Britain so that he couldgive us his insights
both as a Brazilian capoeirista and as a social scientist. We have
receivedencouragement and intellectual support from Andre L. T.
Reis, Gary Alan Fine, John Evans, Jon-athan Skinner, Suzel Reily,
Ben Fincham, Andrew Parker, Susie Scott, and Ieuan Rees: Theyhave
provided the academic equivalent of a great pandeiro (tambourine)
playing for us. PaulAtkinson read the manuscript in draft several
times as it grew and developed, for which we arevery grateful.
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Waiting for AchillesTrovao (Thunder) and Bruxa (the Witch) are
standing in a kickboxing
gym in Tolnbridge, a British city.1 They, and 18 other people,
are waiting forAchilles, their instructor, to arrive. Music from a
CD fills the small gym. Themajority of those present, including
Trovao, are barefoot, dressed in whitetrousers, and have blue cords
knotted round their waists and T-shirts with pic-tures or slogans
or logos about capoeira emblazoned on them. Many, thoughnot Trovao,
wear T-shirts with Achilless name on them. They stretch, standon
their heads or their hands, do cartwheels or in pairs, practice
high kicks.Trovao has warmed up and is talking to Bruxa, who is in
jeans and a sweat-shirt and is holding a notebook and pen:
Bruxa (B): Did you train on Saturday?Trovao (T): No,
SandyIkkiwas moving house. Did you go to watch Perseus?B: Yes,
usual crowd getting ready for the carnival displayinteresting. We
ought
to write a paper or two on all thisembodiment, two-handed
ethnography. . . .T: Not till Ive been to the SSSS conference in
San Diego.B: Of course not. Ill start and then you canoh goodheres
Achilles.
A fit young Brazilian, tanned, beaming, and dressed in jeans and
a fleecewheels a bicycle into the gym. Bruxa turns and kisses himhe
says HeyBruxa! Hey Trovao! and slaps Trovaos hand.2 Achilles then
pulls off hisshoes and runs to the changing room. As he races up
the gym, the womenhe passes kiss him, the men slap hands or do high
fives. The atmo-sphere changes. The individuals and pairs turn into
a class: They stop whatthey are doing, take drinks of water, and
form up into two lines down the gym.One man puts down a
strange-looking wooden bow with a hollow gourd tiedto it and joins
the two lines. Achilles bursts out of the changing room, now
inwhite trousers and T-shirt, with purple and yellow cords at his
waist, shoutsCome on, guys. Lets train, and begins an energetic
warm-up routine.Bruxa and Trovao have separated. Trovao is in the
front row, bent double withhis hands on the floor. Bruxa is
standing where she can see Achilles, with hernotebook open,
scribbling furiously.
In this way, in a small gym in a working-class neighborhood in a
univer-sity city, this article was conceived.
Learning to Balance the BerimbauThis article reflects on a
project to study capoeira conducted by partici-
pant and nonparticipant observation and explores what Coffey
(1999) calledthe ethnographic self. The berimbau is a stringed
instrument, consisting of a
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wooden bow, strung with wire and with a polished gourd attached,
that pro-duces an eerie sound. The player has to balance it on one
fingerit is bothheavy and an unwieldy 5 feet highwhile playing it
with a small thin stickand shaking a rattle. Trovao plays the
berimbau, and the title of this articlecomes from his comment that
the first skill he had to acquire was balancingthe berimbau.
There are two authors, two capoeira enthusiasts, whose dialogue
is theheart of this article. Because capoeira was illegal in Brazil
for 200 years, hadits origins in the African-Brazilian culture of
the slaves, and was then associ-ated with a semicriminal urban
underclass, adherents are known by nick-names or war names bestowed
by their teacher. Many students know thecapoeira names of their
coevals but not their real names. Trovaos use ofSandy-Ikki in the
opening vignette, giving both the mans real name,Sandy, and his
capoeira name, Ikki, to ensure Bruxa recognizes a specificperson is
typical. When Bruxa was in Longhampston one Saturday, two
ofAchilless Cloisterham students visiting Perseuss class introduced
them-selves to her: HiIm Hamish-Toomai and Im Bagheera-Ilya. We
sawyou at the Batizado in Cloisterham, didnt we? Here one man gave
his realname then his capoeira name, the other did the reverse.
This article is a dialogue between a player, Neil Stephens, who
has areal capoeira nickname but is present here under the pseudonym
Trovao(Thunder); and an observer, Sara Delamont, who does not play,
so does nothave a real nickname but has adopted the nickname Bruxa
(the Witch) forthis article. Both nicknames are Brazilian
Portuguese, the core language ofcapoeira. Stephens is better known
in capoeira by his real capoeira nick-name, so we have used a
capoeira pseudonym to simulate the original pur-pose of such names.
Bruxa has an honorary capoeira nickname too, and thathas also been
replaced by a pseudonymous one for symmetry. The capoeirateacher
who has instructed Trovao regularly and been observed most
fre-quently by Bruxa is referred to by the pseudonym Achilles, to
convey hisheroic character in this narrative. We have used
pseudonyms for all thecapoeira teachers, but Achilles chooses to be
named, as do the teachers inLewiss (1992) monograph. He is Claudio
Campos, of the Beribazu Schoolof Capoeira, and has been a
capoeirista for 15 years.
This article locates itself in reflexive ethnographic writing,
explores theskills of the two researchers, contrasts their roles,
presents some of the find-ings and insights from the shared
project, and makes the dangers of their col-laboration explicit.
The central argument is that when the focus of a researchproject is
an embodied activity, two researchers, operating in different
ways,can make explicit what is, more usually, an individual
researchers inner dia-
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logue between experience and knowledge, between participation
anddetachment, between embodied participation and reflexive
contemplation.
Two-handed ethnographic projects are not unusual. They have a
long his-tory in social anthropology, from Bateson and Mead (1942),
through Corbinand Corbin (1987) and the Colliers (Collier, 1997) in
Spain, Wax and Wax(1971) among First Americans, or Spindler and
Spindler (1988) in Germany.In anthropology, the two-person team has
frequently been that of husbandand wife. A sociological example is
Adler and Adler (1999). There are alsocollaborations at the
boundaries of the seventh moment, such as Ellis andBochner (1996)
or Richardson and Lockridge (1991, 1994, 1998), with afocus on
understanding and text production. These latter pairs have beenmuch
more explicit in their publications about the interplay(s) between
theirrelationships and the social field.
We see our collaboration as different. We are not a couple in
any sense ofthat word. We have been teacher (Delamont) and student
(Stephens), and weare now colleagues in academic life. In capoeira,
the old teacher-student linkis reversed: In capoeira, Trovao is the
teacher. The ethnographic partnershipis an inversion of the former
teacher-student relationship. Where Bruxa wasonce Trovaos teacher,
he as the skilled capoeirista is now her instructor. Heis the
participant with his body in real time, as the intellectual
interpreter rec-ollecting in tranquility. Bruxa is the student,
with an observers intellect inreal time and a body that is only an
impediment. Gender is not relevantage,physical skill, and musical
talent are.
The research processes themselves, the settings in which the
data are col-lected and contested, the fieldwork roles, the
embodiment, the experientialunderstanding, and the intellectual
exploration are all mirrored in thedialogic interplay of Trovao and
Bruxa and are vividly present in the article,where two textual
styles of representation confront one another and thereader. These
shifting dualities also represent for the reader unfamiliar
withcapoeira the Janus-faced activity itself, in which trickery,
deception, quick-wittedness, humor, playfulness, and sleight of
hand are valorized as much asphysical skill (Lewis, 1992).
In the settings where capoeira is taught and performedgyms,
dojos,dance studios, youth clubs, pubs, clubs, the streetTrovao is
a full partici-pant, embodying the movements, the rhythms, the
singing, the clapping, andthe ax (energy), whereas Bruxa watches,
embodying nothing. She writes: acerebral activity. These settings
are noisy, full of movement; they are sweaty,crowded, and actually
or potentially public. Events happen at a fast pace,there are no
sustained conversations; the speech channels are essentially
uni-directional as the teacher instructs and the disciples obey.
What talk occurs is
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fragmentary and focused on the immediate, the physical, and the
rhythmic.Dont look at the floor! Meia lua! Watch out for the guy!
Negativa!Ikki, concentrate! Clap louder! OK, guys, relax, and so
on. Teachersand students hug and kiss each other at the start and
finish of each class aspart of the Brazilian ambience. The language
is a mlange of English, Bra-zilian Portuguese, Portuguese
Portuguese, and anything else that will im-prove communication.
When Trovao and Bruxa reflect on the reconciliations of their
data collec-tion, they do so in an academic, quiet, private
setting. Both sit at a table, nomusic plays, neither moves, both
talk in a sustained and considered way, withpauses for thought. No
one plays a berimbau, no one sings, no one claps,there is no ax.
Trovao articulates his tacit, embodied, experiential knowl-edge,
transferring it into the verbal, analytic sphere. Bruxa takes her
written,outsider knowledge and offers it to Trovao to form a
contrastive narrative.The talk is two-dimensional, with Trovao
instructing Bruxa and vice versa, ina context where there is no
instructor and no audience. Neither sweats,there is plenty of
space, and if either were to fall over academically, no oneelse
will see their defeat. Bruxa does not demonstrate her intellectual
skill byknocking Trovao over symbolically or vice versa, the way
Achilles demon-strates his capoeira superiority in class (see the
Falling Over section below).The language is academic English with a
few capoeira terms in Portuguese.There is no physical contact: It
is definitely not a Brazilian environment.
These contrasts of fieldwork setting and dialogic setting are
reflected inthe text of this article in a paradoxical way. The
accumulated, dual under-standings of capoeira classes and their
culture, distilled from the noisy andchaotic setting, are presented
in a traditional academic text where the twoauthorial voices have
been crafted into one shared, dispassionate, scholarlyone. These
passages are written to enable a reader who has never seencapoeira,
but is an experienced consumer of traditional ethnographic
textsabout previously unknown worlds, to appreciate what happens
throughoutEurope and the United States where capoeira is taught and
learned. Parallelswould be Fines (1983, 1987, 1996, 1998)
evocations of fantasy gaming, Lit-tle League, restaurants, and
mushroom hunting or Vails (1999, 2001) of tat-too collecting. For
representational contrast, the private cerebral work ofthe two
ethnographers is presented in a more messy textual format, as
dia-logue and interrogation, as thrust and parry. This is a much
more accuraterepresentation of capoeira itself, where all the
rehearsal, drill, and practiceare only a prelude to the real thing,
the game, fight, play, dance in theroda. In the contest in the
roda, the two opponents ask each other questions,probe and resist,
attack and defend, feint and deceive. The cut and thrust of a
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game is often described to novices with a question-and-answer
metaphor,and it is this that occurs in the academic setting.
Paradoxically, therefore, theshared understanding of capoeira
achieved across a table in a quiet office isrhetorically more like
capoeira than the way it is represented in the con-ventional
academic text. If Trovao is more tested in the intellectual
gamethan in the physical class, so too the reader is more stretched
by the messier,dual-voiced, dialogic text. This article contrasts
the tacit knowledge ofembodiment and the explicit knowledge of the
talk to reflect on the opportu-nities and possibilities for doing
good fieldwork on a very physical activity,where words are
relatively unimportant and movement is everything, or al-most
everything.
The general issuesabout the relative importance of body and of
mind inethnography, about the levels of physical and mental
competence needed tostudy an energetic physical activity, and about
the successful teaching ofdance and martial artsare wider than the
research on studying capoeira asit is taught, learned, and enjoyed
outside Brazil. Stollers (2004) discussionof sensuous ethnography
comes to mind. There are academic studies ofcapoeira in Brazil
(Browning, 1995; Downey, 2005; Lewis, 1992) and ofteaching it in
Warsaw (Reis, 2003), but all were written by
single-handedpractitioner ethnographers. Our contention is that a
two-handed ethnogra-phy, combining participation and
nonparticipation, with continuous reflex-ive dialogue, generates
different insights not only about capoeira but alsorelevant to any
embodied activity. Good fieldwork depends on tough-minded, critical
reflexivity (Davies et al., 2004; Hammersley & Atkinson,1995).
The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth in reflexive writings,
inwhich people explore problems that arose during their fieldwork
and tell sto-ries about how they overcame them, or failed to do so
(De Marrais, 1998;Jokinen, 2004). These retrospective tales about
fieldwork vary widely intheir tough-mindedness, their
self-criticism, and their reflexivity. Some arefrankly
self-indulgent, others descriptive, many are very carefully crafted
toenhance the status of their authors (Atkinson, 1996). Most of the
publishedreflexive texts are single authored, even when they
address research con-ducted by teams. Perhaps the best-known
example is Geers (1964) recollec-tions about Becker, Geer, and
Hughes (1968). The dual dialogic perspectivecould usefully be
extended to, for example, dance ethnography (Buckland,1999a, 1999b;
Gore, 1999; Picart & Gergen, 2004; Williams, 1999) or
theethnography of sport (McPhail, 2004; Sassatelli, 1999) or, more
specific, themartial arts (Jones, 2002). There are also links to
the work of De Nora (2000)on music in a variety of everyday life
contexts.
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Thunder and the Witch: Skills and UnderstandingIn this section,
the authors are briefly introduced with their qualifications
to participate in and understand capoeira. The possible
characteristics andqualifications are physical ability, language,
race and ethnicity, nationality,knowledge of African-Brazilian
culture, Web skills, social science skills,musical talent, and
gender.
Trovao was a successful, skilled practitioner of another martial
art fromthe age of 9 to 21. He has been learning capoeira for 2
years and has achievedthe second level of competence, the corda
azul-marron (blue and brownbelt). Bruxa has no physical skills at
all. Both are White, British Anglo-Sax-ons, neither speaks
Brazilian-Portuguese. Trovao is male, Bruxa female. InBrazil, in
the United States, and in Europe, women are welcomed in classes,and
so there is nothing in Bruxas sex that prevents her involvement.
How-ever, in the classes observed, there are usually more men than
women, andthe majority of the teachers are male. Trovaos karate
background, and itsutility in learning capoeira and developing an
explanatory framework to the-orize that learning, is explored
further below.
Capoeira is practiced and performed to music. Training is done
to CDs,performance is accompanied by live music. All students are
expected to singand to clap in appropriate rhythms. Serious
students learn to play the drums,tambourines, cowbells, and most
important, the berimbau itself. Bruxa canneither sing in tune nor
hold a clapped rhythm and has never learned to playany instrument.
Trovao can sing, clap in the correct rhythm, and play thecowbells
and the berimbau. He has musical talent, and this is coupled with
anexperiential grasp of music based on 9 years playing the guitar,
6 years pro-ducing electronic music, a summers worth of singing
lessons in his lateteens, and 2 years playing capoeira.
Most of the information about capoeira available outside Brazil,
bothintellectual and practical, is Web based.3 Histories of
capoeira, for example,are easily found on Web sites. So too are
clothing and other items for sale andmost vital, information on the
classes that are available in each city. Trovaohas good Web skills
and can routinely find both intellectual and practicalmaterial
using information and communication technology. Bruxa isrepelled by
the Web, responding like a vampire to garlic or daylight.
Both Trovao and Bruxa are well-qualified social scientists who
have beenprimarily concerned with the cerebral and the verbal and
the intellectual. Intheir main professional research, Trovao has
worked on the sociology ofknowledge, Bruxa on sociology of
education. Neither has previously investi-gated a primarily
physical, musical, bodily activity valued for its
physicality,musicality, and bodily pleasures.
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Trovao and Bruxa know about capoeira classes in Britain in
differentways. Trovao trains twice a week, each time for 1.5 to 2
hours in a class, andpractices at home for from 6 to 8 hours on top
of time in the class in the sum-mer, much less in winter or when
injured. This is supplemented by streetrodas, informal rodas in
parks, and sometimes demonstrations in pubs orclubs. Bruxa observes
a capoeira class at least twice a week for 1.5 to 2hours, taking
ethnographic field notes in situ and writing them up afterward.
Trovao has a physical understanding of capoeira, based both on
learningwhat the author Nestor Capoeira (1995, 2002) called the
dancefightgame himself and on 13 years of karate to a high level.
This provides Trovaowith a disciplined, educated body (Frank, 1990,
1991). Bruxa has a cerebral,academic understanding based on reading
about capoeira and other relevantfeatures of Brazilian life such as
race, Candomble, samba, and slavery, aswell as the ethnographic
research itself. Reading on capoeira covers aca-demic anthropology
(Downey, 2005; Lewis, 1992; Reis, 2003), other aca-demic texts
(Browning, 1995; Schreiner, 1993), and the books thatcapoeiristas
read (Almeida, 1986; Capoeira, 1995, 2002; Twigger, 1999).The two
sets of skills and experiences enable a shared ethnography to
beconducted.
Dialogic Play
We, Bruxa and Trovao, are in a university office seated
companionably ata table in a book-lined room. It is silent apart
from our talkno music, notraffic noise, no berimbau being strummed.
Together we reflect on howimportant that embodied experience is,
both to Trovaos ability in capoeiraand to his research input:
B: Can you bear it if I read a bit of my fieldnotesthe
written-up versionwhereIm puzzled, but Im certain you know what was
going on?
T: For sure.B: There are four things that happened in a regular
class with Achilles that I dont
think I understand at all. One evening in the late spring, Ive
written:
They have been learning moves, and practicing them for about 45
minutes.Achilles chooses Trovao to demonstrate an exercise: a
stretching exercise Ithink, not an actual capoeira move. Achilles
stands. Trovao lies on his backwith his head at Achilless feet, and
his hands holding Achilless ankles. ThenTrovao goes up into an
arched, bridge position with Achilles leaning over tosupport him.
Once Trovao is balanced in the bridge position, he raises one legup
into the air and stretches it out at a 75 degree angle. Then he
puts that leg
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back down and raises the other. Trovao can do this: but when
they go into pairsto practice the exercise, few of the other
students can do it.
T: Well, Achilles has never explained why we do that, so Ive
only got mythoughts.
B: Does it help having the other person there? Does it help to
hold their ankles?T: I must admit I dont find it helps but I can do
a bridge you see.B: But lots of people cant, can they? About two
thirds of the regular class cant
easily do a bridge properly?T: Depends what you call regular
class: the people with the cordas can, I think.
But you get a lot of people who cant do it. That and the
handstand arethefirst kind of hurdles to learning capoeira. Theyre
discriminating things, thatpeople can and cant do.
Trovao then explains in detail, at length, the understanding he
has as aplayer.
The purpose of the stretching exercise. If a person does a
bridge alone,their hands can slide: Holding someone elses ankles
prevents that. Gettingup into bridge is hard, the standing
supporter helps the person in the bridge toget up and hold the
position. The exercise strengthens the muscles needed toget into
and hold the bridge. Lifting one leg strengthens the muscles in
theother and helps the player practice how, in the capoeira game,
they will rollout of the bridge into another position. Bruxa could
not deduce any of thesethings from Achilless demonstration.
Typically, Achilles did not explicitlyexplain or justify the
exercise: He demonstrated it, required the students to doit if they
could, and then moved on.
Trovao has escaped from Bruxas first challenge. Bruxa moves
on.
B: At the end of that class Achilles had a samba roda. I
wrote,
Achilles drums a samba rhythm, and they all form a circle and
dance on thespot. Trovao takes a girl into the roda, and some other
men go into the circlealone. Achilles stops playing and says: When
we have dancing, you have todance with a girl. A guy cant dance
with a guy. He then demonstrates some-thing, which is hard for me
to see: but I think it is how a man steals a girl fromher current
dancing partner.
Trovao explains: The reprimand during the samba incident was
under-stood by Trovao, not merely experienced by him. In a samba
roda, only onemixed couple dances in the ring. This is different
from a dance teachers dem-onstration, where everyone practices
moves in lines, or from dancing at aparty or in a club, where
everyone can dance at once. If another man wanted
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to dance in the roda, he did need to cut in on Trovao, and
Achilles was,indeed, teaching a couple of strategies that can be
used to do that. He thenamplifies, by contrasting Achilless
self-confident use of these techniqueswith that of the
students:
T: Achilles always does it the same way. He walks in, he has
this big smile, andholds his shoulders in this sultry, masculine,
dancey way. In Tolnbridge, whichis not Brazil where I guess theyd
be closer, the guy and the girl are dancingabout a foot away from
each other, and Achilles can fit in the gap: Or he willcome up
behind the bloke and remove him out of the way.
B: Can you do that?T: When its become the normal activity to me,
I think maybe Ill have been there
too long.
Much earlier in that lesson, Achilles gave a small demonstration
ofcapoeira rhythms and how to clap them. Before the samba roda,
Achillesgave the class a lecture on the importance of his
authority: Students must notorganize events or performances; he is
their teacher, he is Brazilian, he is theknowledgeable person, his
reputation could be damaged by unauthorizedperformances and
displays. As Trovao and Bruxa reflect on these incidents,the
embodied experience is rendered explicit through the dialogic
discourse.By talking, by sharing two perspectives on the events and
their embodied,dialogic, and social meanings, the ethnographic
account is strengthened anddeepened.
Trovao understood the need for the clapping lesson, teaching the
classes toclap in the correct rhythms, following the berimbau,
better than Bruxa did.He explains,
Id say the importance of clapping is firstly the combined role
of inclusion andmusic in creating ax. If everyone claps everyone is
involved in the roda andthe music is louder. Secondly, I can see
how the clapping rhythm correlates tohow youre meant to ginga [the
basic foot movement] in time with the music. Inits strictest sense
I think the back leg should go back to complete the secondposition
of capoeira on the third clap beat. In fact, the leading rhythmical
ele-ment is the dong of the berimbau, and both the clap and the
back foot are ledby that. Perhaps this is more noticeable not by
watching the third beat butinstead the fourth missed beat of the
clapping, as this should be the moment theplayer doesnt make an
explicit step and is instead shifting their momentumfrom swinging
their leg back and bringing it forward again.
Trovao understands the lecture on discipline and the instructors
honorand reputation as a discipulo (disciple, student): He is
subject to that disci-
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pline, and when there are performances, his abilities reflect
well or badly onAchilless teaching. Trovao reflects that
theres a kind of a reputation thing going on but were not that
good. Com-pared to people that normally demonstrate capoeira, were
probably prettyrubbish. II dont think Achilles wants an audience to
go around watchingpeople not being very good at stuff and itit
representing him. Achilles neversaid this but Raksha told me that
when we did this show in The Maldives [aworld music caf bar] when
Achilles was away some time ago, Achilleswouldnt be happy if that
was knownso its never been mentioned to him.Raksha and Phao didnt
realize at the time. Butbut Raksha told us we werentallowed to wear
our club uniform abadas [trousers]. Or anything that said theclub
on it. So that people wouldnt know
B: Which club you were in, yeah.T: Yeah. Yeah. Achilles had said
if we perform, we will represent him and we will
represent the lineage. If we go out and start doing stuff in the
streets so hewanted it to be good and proper. And its never going
to be that good and properif we do itI was thinking youve got to be
good at karate to do a public showand there, people whove been
doing it a year, that would be red belts, the ideaof red belts
doing a public demonstration, it would be outrageous. How couldthey
possibly be good? They have only been doing it that short amount of
thetime? Well, obviously the two are related. Achilles wants to
okay things toensure that theyretheyre going to uphold his
reputation and the reputationof the group.
Here Trovao unpicks the complex reputational issues that lie
behindAchilless outburst in the light of his karate experience, the
history of theTolnbridge class, and the complex awareness contexts
in that class. Bruxahad never been told about the secret
performance at The Maldives. Hereagain, Trovaos experiences,
especially his student role, subject to the disci-pline, is
different from Bruxas. Bruxas behavior does not effect
Achillessreputation in the same way because he is not training her
in the physical skillsof capoeira.4
These are four episodes from a typical class in Tolnbridge.
Similar ana-lytic insight through dialogue came from exploring one
incident from a classled by Perseus:
B: Can we go on to something that happened that night Diomedes
was in town?Can I read what Ive written, because I have no idea
what was going on?
T: For sure.B: Theres a bit of introduction for our papers
readers, OK?
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Unusually Perseus is teaching in Tolnbridge, with Ulysses and
Diomedes, whois visiting from Antwerp. All three are Brazilians
living in Europe. We are in auniversity sports hall. There are ten
male students including Trovao and fourwomen. The group do a ninety
minute class with Ulysses, and then a furtherninety minute lesson
with Diomedes.
T: I remember thatwe were all exhausted.B: OKnow the bit I dont
get.
Perseus is clearly unhappy with the sound quality of the
berimbau Lunghri hasbrought. He asked Lunghri about the wire, which
he felt was too slack. Was itfrom a car tyre? Lunghri said
yesPerseus asked what kind of car? Lunghri,obviously fazed, said he
had no idea: he and Raksha had strung it together.Raksha came over,
Perseus repeated the question: Raksha said he had no ideawhat car
the tyre had come from. Perseus told Lunghri that the gourd
(thecabasa) was too big.
T: I dont remember that, but Lunghri has talked about it
since.B: What was going on?T: I dont knowneither does Lunghri or
Rakshawe never found out what
Perseus didnt like.B: Speculate for me anyway. What effect does
the wire have on the sound?T: I am not sure I have much to say on
the quality of the sounds. Regarding the
slackness of the string, if its too slack it would (a) perhaps
mean the berimbauisnt curved and, thus, able to hold the cabasa on
tightly enough or get yourhand between the string and the verde
[the wood]; (b) My sense is it would betrickier to distinguish as a
player of the berimbau between the note played withthe stone pushed
firmly against the string and the one where its held closelyenough
to vibrate against the stone when its hit. You would have to push
reallyhard to get the first note and the second note may not work
at all.
Regarding cabasa size and pitch, I am not too sure there is such
a thing as awrong pitch, as there are the three different types of
berimbau, each with a dif-ferent pitch. Of course, once this set of
categories has been mobilized, aberimbau could be too low or high
pitch to be one of the three types, gunga[bass] etc. Pitch of
course is a product mostly of the cabasa. Although myknowledge of
physics tells me a tighter string should also alter pitch (as with
aguitar) I am not sure a berimbau is precise enough as a pitch
device for this tohave any impact.
In this long, serious comment, Trovao reveals a great deal of
experiential,embodied musical knowledge. Although he says he can
only speculate aboutPerseuss concerns, he can speculate in ways
Bruxa could not begin to doherself.
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Capoeira is intensely physical, thoroughly embodied. Talking
allowsTrovao and Bruxa to articulate Trovaos embodied knowledge, as
in the fol-lowing dialogues on kicking and falling. In their shared
project, and in theanalyses that follow, the tacit knowledge of
embodiment is contrasted withthe explicit knowledge of the talk.
The embodied understanding is contrastedwith the observational eye
and ear, and this tension mirrors the endless dia-logues between
experience and knowledge that characterize enculturationinto a new
cultural milieu. The two-handed project parallels the inner
dia-logues that the single-handed ethnographer has: of engagement
and disen-gagement, of commitment and detachment, of belonging and
marginality,and of emotion versus detachment.
Kicks and KickingB: Tell me about the kicks in capoeira: you
said once that having done karate gave
you a head start in the capoeira kickscan you explain that a bit
more?T: Yeahfor sure: I guess that if you look at it at a basic, a
fundamental level, it is
somethingprobably to do with how power is generated: as you know
wellbecause youve seen it in capoeira, most of the power is
generated from spin-ning and momentumyou role on the floor and you
stand up in the kick.
B: Yes.T: Its all about maintaining the spin and the momentum.
Whereas with the type
of karate I did, and its fairly common among karates, the
fundamental princi-ple was to use the muscles in your legs.
B: Right.T: A lot of it is punching but also kicking. The point
was that you keep your back
straight and everything is to do with twisting your hips from an
angled posi-tion . . . and keeping the back straight the power of
your back leg is pushedthrough to your hands or the front leg.
There is simply no way that a nonparticipant could understand
the differ-ences between kicks in two martial arts as well as
Trovao can, because heembodies the experience. Bruxa could watch
karate and capoeira for manyhours and never get that experience.
This dialogue goes on:
B: Did your karate experience help with learning capoeira
kicks?T: I did karate for quite a long time and I got quite good at
it, so I mean some of the
more advanced techniques strayed a little bit more into kind of
momentumterritory.
B: Right.
Trovao stands up, moves into a space and demonstrates a kick
that Bruxahas seen taught many times and used in many games.
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T: What in karate is called Mawashi-geri, which is when you
bring your footaround like that. Martelo in capoeira. That is
exactly the same as in karate but alot of capoeira kicks like the
Queixadas and the Armadas, the spinning kicks,they dont feature in
karate at all. I guess it wasnt too hard for me to pick upcapoeira.
. . .
B: Though you hadnt trained for 2 or 3 years?T: But I always
felt that I had some sort of latent flexibility in me and I could
coor-
dinate well.B: Mmmm.T: So that all helps me. If you look at my
game now, my kicking and the things that
are closest to karate Im much better at than things like
headstands and hand-stands which are alien. Im really quite poor at
them if truth be known.[Laughs]
Bruxa reflects on how several of the men had come to capoeira
from othermartial arts and would share Trovaos self-evaluation.
Some of the womenhave come from gymnastics or yoga and find the
handstands and headstandsmore familiar than the kicks. This gives
Bruxa a whole set of research ques-tions to follow up.
Falling OverOn another occasion, later in the fieldwork, Bruxa
asks Trovao to expand
on a remark he had made during a weekend-long training event,
again aboutthe embodied expertise of the disciplined body. In
capoeira, when two peo-ple play and fight, if one succeeds in
throwing, knocking, or tricking the otherinto falling to the floor,
he or she is the winner. Expert players can alwaysdefeat novices
and sometimes choose to do so. In the United States andEurope,
capoeira is taught as a noncontact sport and throws are
discouraged,as are kicks that make contact. In Brazil, especially
in male working-classstreet games, actual fights take place.
Outside Brazil, in novicesbaptism cer-emony (Batizado), they are
ceremonially thrown by a superior player as theirformal entry to
the craft. In training classes, attacking moves are taught,
usu-ally by the teacher knocking over one of the students. Bruxa,
who has noexperience of a contact sport, again seeks to learn from
the embodied exper-tise of Trovao:
B: Now you said at the weekend that with your karate background
you were goodat falling.
T: Mm.B: Can you just talk that through again?T: Yeah, I mean
thats not necessarily a formal mechanism that they taught me in
karate. It was my kind of coping strategy within karate when I
was a kid.
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B: Yes.T: We trained in an old church hall with a firm wooden
floor and when you do a
takedown in karate its much more bam whack, and you hit the
person acrossthe neck and they go thud down. I would just get used
to falling. You knew itwas coming.
B: Yes.T: And you would just make all your muscles really
loose.B: Yes.T: So that youd just fall down really easily as soon
as they touched you.B: Yes.T: You fall. You dont fight him, let
them force you down.B: Right.T: You just flop down and when you go
on the floor you dont mind. You spin
around and the momentum goes away instead of you stopping it on
one thud.
Here, Trovao has used embodied adolescent memories of karate and
howhe learnt to fall so he was not hurt, even though the floor was
hard, in his newhobby of capoeira. The embodied skills, of going
loose and spinning onthe floor, are made explicit. Trovao goes on
to contrast the regular take-downs in karate with the rare
knockdowns in capoeira:
T: You dont get that when youre training with the other pupils
in the class itsonly when Achilles pulls you out to demonstrate
takedowns against youbecause hes the only one who can do it
properly.
B: Yes.T: And hes the one that could [laughs] do a takedown
especially when hes dem-
onstrating. You also never know what takedown hes going to do.B:
No.T: Thats, thats the worst thing because hell show you a takedown
and all of a
sudden hell say, You could do this one as well, and attack and
you fall in theother direction. But as soon as I go, I just let
myself go and a nice comfortablefloor means I dont really remember
being hurt by falling over, which youcould be.
Bruxa is learning three related things here. In training
classes, students arenot supposed to knock each other over, so,
unlike karate, Trovao needs hislearned skill of how to fall only
when he is chosen as Achilless demonstra-tion partner.
Subsequently, Trovao commented that he engaged in the
self-conscious analytic comparison of his embodied karate
experience with hislife as a capoeirista only when in dialogue with
Bruxa. Second, both Bruxaand Trovao know that Achilles chooses
Trovao for demonstrations of attacksleading to takedowns because
Trovao knows how to fall without getting hurt.Achilles has praised
him for falling well. He flicked me over one day, and
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when I was lying there on the floor Achilles said, Ah, Trovao,
you fall downso good [laughs]. Third, Achilles uses these
demonstrations not only toteach the class a takedown but also to
remind even the most advanced andserious students that he is far,
far better than they are and can always outwitand out maneuver
them. This is, in a mild way, an example of the deceit andtrickery
(malicia) that is at the heart of capoeira (Lewis, 1992) and of
itsmultiple possibilities.
Loyalties and LineagesTrovao trains with one teacher, Achilles,
in one lineage of capoeira. Loy-
alty is required by capoeira teachers, as Lewis (1992) and Reis
(2003)explained. As Achilles says, Trust your teacher . . . or
leave! Bruxa is ableto observe other teachers because being a
researcher, loyalty is not manda-tory in the same way that it is
required of discipulos. Trovao explains thereciprocal loyalty and
discipleship between student and teacher as follows:
When you watch DVDs, or videos, or clips on Web sites, or
demonstrations bymasters, you look out for teachers you know. Ive
seen the DVD of the Batizadonow and Ive seen some of the video
clips from our site and some of the clips,shots, of various masters
playing and when Achilles is on I think to myself Ah,thats my
instructor. And you do feel almost a sense of, ownership is
per-haps the wrong word, but personal possession.
Loyalty to one teacher, and the sheer physical exhaustion that
comes withserious training, are double-edged issues in fieldwork.
Bruxa, as a nonpartic-ipant observer, can see things that Trovao
does not and can more easily com-pare teachers. Yet Trovao has the
embodied experience when he spins, kicks,sweats, and falls and when
he picks up the berimbau and balances it on hisfinger. These are
simply not available to a nonparticipant observer: Unlessyou have
tried to balance a berimbau yourself or been knocked over
repeat-edly, you cannot know these things with your body. However,
the styles of theteachers, their rhetoric, their strategies to
create axe (the good energy thatempowers capoeiristas), and their
ability to build up a loyal clientele ofdiscipulos are visible from
the sidelines. Focusing on the rhetorical strategiesof a teacher
when you are both upside down and you are concentrating on
bal-ancing there, exhausted, and dripping with sweat, is probably
impossible.
Talking together allows Bruxa and Trovao to reflect on different
teachersthey have known. In the following discussion, we reflect on
Achilles, theinstructor watched and learned from most; Perseus, a
very different teacher;and Cadmus, a man who taught spasmodically
in Tolnbridge some years ago.
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Good capoeira classes are characterized by both clear
instruction in themoves and ax:
B: You know this thing that you said to me, and three or four
other people havenow said it as well: Perseus is a better teacher,
but Achilles has more ax. Haveyou got any thoughts about what it is
about Achilles that generates ax or whyPerseus doesnt? Have you got
any analytic or personal thoughts about it?
T: Perseus will have a session going when you will be moving
around and every-thing like that and then hell come along and he
will stop the music, Achillesdoesnt stop the music, Perseus will
stop the music and hell stand there andtalk. He wont shout over the
music and run around at the same time like Achil-les does. Hell
talk in a soft and normal voice. Even from the very beginning ofa
class, the warm-up, we all stand in a circle and its a lot slower,
its not likeCome on, guys, lets do this like Achilles.
B: Ive seen Perseus teach several times now, and one thing I
noticed was that heseemed to be spending longer actually breaking
moves down into their compo-nent parts. Like the queida de rins [a
move many novices find hard to do].
T: Yeah I know.B: He seemed to be demonstrating it almost joint
by joint.T: Doing it exactly.B: Showing where your elbow should be.
Now is that what you mean by a good
teacher?T: Totally, totally, and that can be quite valuable.B:
Yes.T: But it takes the adrenalin out of his session.B: Right.T:
Whereas Achilles would just do something and jump in the air and
spin around
and say Do that [laughs] and then everyone stands there
bewildered for a bitand by the time someone has a go hes jumping in
a different way.
B: Right, OK, so its partly then because Perseus certainly
spends more time talk-ing about the philosophy and the history and
all those kind of things.
T: At the end of every session youll sit in a circle and hell
ask, So what did youthink of todays session?
B: Yes.T: And Ill say, It was really special [laughs].
Here, Trovao is reminding Bruxa that introspection and sharing
introspec-tion are not part of his enjoyment of capoeira. He enjoys
playing the dance,fight, game, and the music, not the public
philosophical musing Perseusencourages.
B: Because Achilles never does that. Cadmus used to do it, didnt
he? You all hadto say what you had got out of the days class.
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T: Yeah, yeah, I forgot. Perseus is very much more about
talking. One day, I thinkthis was the first session I went to, we
all went out for a drink, then we wentback to Raksha and Phaos flat
and we had some videotapes, some really goodtapes of maculele5 and
things like that that Perseus showed us and he was goingon in what
seems to be fairly typical Perseus-speak about What good is
thetreasure at the bottom of the ocean? He was saying, It has no
value and thatwas his metaphor. Then he started talking about
capoeira masters who havelots of information but dont share it and
he says thats why he shares informa-tion and that is quite
important too.
Here the dialogue develops our insights into what makes good
capoeirateaching and what creates good ax. Bruxa has watched
Perseus teach moreoften than Trovao has been a guest student in his
classes. She has seen the dif-ferences between them. Trovao,
however, has felt the ax in his muscles andhis heart; and with most
of his closest friends in capoeira, has chosen Achil-les over
Perseus as his teacher. Therefore, he can use his embodied
knowl-edge to contrast the two regimes. Things that Bruxa can see
in a detachedway are felt by Trovao.
Before and After the BatizadoThis dialogic reflection can be
seen in a conversation about what it feels
like to achieve the first corda after a years training with one
teacher and how,when cohorts gain their first, blue, belt together,
they are all changed by therite de passage. Again, Bruxa and Trovao
are seated in an office in the univer-sity, reflecting on how being
baptized into the capoeira lineage, gainingthe blue belt, had
altered Trovaos experience and that of his coevals. Trovaodescribed
the first classes after the Batizado in response to an
observationfrom Bruxa:
B: I thought everyone looked more confident after the Batizado,
but is that just meseeing a difference because I had been away for
3 weeks?
T: When we came back, we had what seemed to be our first proper
session, in thatclub, for quite a while. And I think he definitely
pushed us harder. Achilles, hedecided, weve got a blue corda now,
hes going to make us do better stuff, so,so, we were pushed harder,
and I felt that I grew in confidence from doing it, soyeah, I cant,
I cant see any reason why that wouldnt be the case for
everyone.
B: Mmm. You know Im just standing here watching, it just struck
me, some of thepeople who are not as fit as you, havent taken
capoeira as seriously and arentas good as youwho Ive been watching.
They looked as though they hadmore confidence, that if they tried a
kick they would be able to do it, as opposedto standing there,
knowing they couldnt do it. They looked as though they
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were practicing moves they felt they could do, rather than
trying to rememberwhat it was that had been demonstrated to
them.
T: Yeah, mmm. Well, its, well, its certainly not because we were
trained reallywell at the Batizado, because there was only one
teaching session and that wasall Angolan.6 We basically did things
wed never done beforeand things thatdont translate that well into
the kinds of training that we do, you know, in thesessions. But
since the Batizado, the training sessions have changed.
Everyonesaid both that Achilles is pushing us a bit more, which
made you feel better, andit also just looks better if people are in
the right clothes as well.7 I used to train inshorts and then I
just bought some white trousers, and just by doing that I feltthat
I was better cause you couldnt see how bendy my knee was so much
andthings like that.
B: And did the group change socially?T: Yeah, I mean everyoneit
was really different between the training sessions
before and after because, you know, before, a couple of times Id
gone to thepub with a few people, but, but afterwards Ive been to
quite a few of theirhouses and people started exchanging phone
numbers and going out togetherand stuff.
Here Trovao is drawing on his own experiences to make four
importantpoints about the rite de passage. First, having the right
clothes changes thecapoeira novices self-confidence and
self-presentation (Stephens &Delamont, 2005). Second, the
expectations of the instructor change. Third,although there were
some master classes appended to the Batizado, they werenot
immediately useful in improving technique. Fourth, the social
cohesionof the student group changed. These are all reported for
Beribazu by Reis(2003) in his autoethnography of capoeira teaching
in Warsaw. Bruxa,because she does not wear the uniform, take the
classes, mix socially with thestudents, or get knocked over by a
mestre (master) in a Batizado, feels partic-ularly distant from
these changes.
Thus far, the benefits of the dual roles of Trovao and Bruxa
have beenforegrounded in a reflexive way. There are, of course,
dangers in the project,and it is an analysis of these that brings
the article to an end.
DangersThere are dangers in two-handed ethnography, which fall
unequally
because of our respective histories. Bruxa chose capoeira as a
fieldwork sitefor intellectual, academic reasons: a desire to find
an engrossing thing tostudy in Tolnbridge, a love of Brazil, and a
fascination inspired by Lewissbook (1992). Trovao came to capoeira
as a hobby, quite distinct from his aca-demic life: He has more to
lose from the joint research.
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Trovao could lose his main hobby, and his pleasure in it, by
being forcedto be reflexive, to intellectualize, to write, to
publish. Capoeira could be col-onized by the academic and the
intellectual. The play, the pleasure,could be destroyed by the
intellectual agenda. Trovao could lose his friendsin the capoeira
class if he were thought to be there as a researcher rather thanas
a player, especially if there were any threats to the privacy of
the otherplayers rather than a study of their public performance in
capoeira classes.
Bruxa could valorize Trovaos experience and understanding of
capoeiraat the expense of the experiences and understandings of
others: Having acoworker with skills and talents can make an
ethnographer lazy. The experi-ence of other novices in the United
Kingdom, and perhaps especially of thewomen, and of men who are
Brazilian or Portuguese (and quite a few learnersare) could be
submerged beneath Trovaos career as a capoeirista. Becauseshe is
older, and many of the capoeiristas are, or are like, students in
her homeuniversity, Bruxa is always poised to fall out of analytic
mode and into aninterventionist one:
There has been a Batizado in Longhampston, and it is the meal
break betweenthe ceremony and a public demonstration. Bruxa and
Trovao are in a queue forthe evening meal with several Cloisterham
and Tolnbridge people, and some ofthe new graduates. One young man
asks, Can one of you guys show me how totie this corda? Before any
of the Tolnbridge men could speak, Bruxa heardherself saying Well,
Im sure they canbut you need to know youve got it onthe wrong
sidemen tie their cordas on the right hip, yours is on the
girlsside. The young man whipped off his cordaand two Tolnbridge
menshowed him how to thread and tie it on the correct hip.
Writing up the notes Bruxa was furious with herself: too
interventionist,too precipitate, and data were missed. Would the
Tolnbridge and Cloisterhammen have helped him tie the corda but
left the knot on the wrong hip? Bruxasprotective instinctsbased on
an earlier incidenthad triumphed over adata collection opportunity.
Some months earlier Bruxa had recorded,
It is a Friday night in Tolnbridge: the hours practice and
instruction is over,they have paid for the lesson, and the roda is
about to begin. Achilles plays anopening ladainha (introductory
solo) but does not put any players into the cir-cle. Instead he
stops the music, and gives a little talk. In this lineage he
saysmen wear their cordas with the knot and the dangling ends on
the right, andwomen on the left. Baloo, who was awarded his about
three weeks ago, iswearing his on the wrong side. He blushes,
everyone laughs, and he rapidlychanges it to the other side.
Achilles stresses that this is not meant to be dis-criminatorywomen
are equal in capoeirabut it is just the way the Found-
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ing Mestre decreed it. (It is rare for Achilles to teach the
history or etiquette ofthe lineage explicitly.)
In her reflexive diary, Bruxa had recorded feeling sorry for
Baloo and theembarrassment he must have felt being a cultural
incompetent in front of hisfellow students. In Longhampstead,
Bruxas desires to teach, to be bossy, andto be maternal and
protective, had completely swamped the proper concernsof the
ethnographer.8
As good, critically reflexive ethnographers, it is by facing
these dangersthat the research will develop. When Travao realizes
that he reflects on hiskarate career compared to his capoeira
career only when Bruxa asks him to,or when Bruxa realizes that what
she thought she saw was or, more impor-tant, was not experienced in
that way by the students, the research advances.
ConclusionsThe interrelated movements in sociology toward
(re)discovering the
body, toward (re)discovering rhetorical concerns, and toward
(re)discover-ing the sociological relevance of studying cultural
forms are integrated in thisarticle. The deceptive discourse
(Lewis, 1992) of capoeira is, playfully,represented by the
deceptive discourses of the article itself.
Notes
1. Classes take place in many British university cities,
including four we have calledCloisterham, Longhampston, Tolnbridge,
and Twelford. Achilles teaches in Cloisterham andTolnbridge,
Perseus in Longhampston and Twelford. Regular training sessions are
offered in allfour cities at least two evenings per week, and there
are also classes on Saturdays in Cloisterhamand Longhampston.
Classes last 90 minutes, of which an hour is supervised practice
and the restlectures and a roda: the actual play of the game in the
ring. In addition, there are public perfor-mances in the street, or
pubs, or at festivals. Periodically, there are 2- to 4-day-long
festivals ofcapoeira, when baptisms and belt ceremonies are held,
visiting masters teach and award thebelts, and there are parties.
Achilles might fly to Budapest to be a visiting teacher, the
seriousCloisterham capoeiristas might all travel to Longhampston
for an extra class with Perseus andhis students if he has a guest
master visiting, Achilles might ask for volunteers from
hisCloisterham and Tolnbridge classes to come with him to Antwerp,
or a Tolnbridge student mightchoose to train in Cloisterham on a
Saturday if she has missed her regular class.
2. Achilles has actually given Bruxa a real capoeira nickname as
an honorary class mem-ber, which he uses.
3. Readers unfamiliar with capoeira can consult
http://www.capoeirasj.com/history/index.html. There are interviews
with American women capoeiristas at
http://www.gracemillenium.com/spring00/capoeira.html.
4. Bruxas access to and roles in capoeira classes are discussed
in Delamont (2005). InBeribazu, the lineage to which Achilles
belongs, the social sciences are respected, and many of
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the mestres and instructors have PhDs and publish books. Bruxas
access is also facilitated by herenthusiasm for paying the same fee
as trainees in all classes.
5. Maculele is a dance in which the players beat sticks
together, based on machete fighting inthe days of Brazilian slavery
done in grass skirts, to a set of distinctive songs and
drumming.Beribazu teaches maculele and other Brazilian dances,
which are incorporated into publicdisplays.
6. There are two traditions in capoeira, Angola and regional.
Achilles belongs to Beribazu,which melds the two, although regional
(which has more emphasis on kicks and less on workingvery close to
the ground) is more prominent. Students of Achilles and Perseus
find the classestaught by visiting Angola specialists particularly
exhausting.
7. Students can attend a Batizado only if they have bought the
uniform of their teachers lin-eage and a T-shirt celebrating that
Batizado. After a Batizado, all the students who were initiatedhave
a corda and the correct trousers and T-shirts.
8. Trovao and Lunghri both said subsequently, when asked, that
they had learned on whichhip to tie their cordas at their Batizado,
by osmosis, and that they would have told theLonghampston man to
tie his on the right hip if Bruxa had not done so.
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Neil Stephens is a research associate at the Centre for Economic
and Social Aspects ofGenomics at Cardiff University, Cardiff,
Wales, United Kingdom, where he is conducting an eth-nography of
the U.K. stem cell bank. His doctoral thesis explores the social
construction of mac-roeconomic knowledge, drawing on elite
interviews. He trained in Shotokan Karate for 11 years
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and was awarded a 2nd Dan Black belt. He has also trained in
capoeira for 3 years and holds aBrown belt.
Sara Delamont is a reader in sociology in the School of Social
Sciences, Cardiff University, Car-diff, Wales, United Kingdom. Her
most recent book is Feminist Sociology (Sage, 2003). She isthe
editor, with Atkinson, Coffey, Lofland, and Lofland, of Handbook of
Ethnography (Sage,2001), and joint editor, with P. Atkinson, of the
journal Qualitative Research. Her original degreewas in
anthropology, and she teaches a course on the anthropology of
Brazil. A recurrent themeof her work on educational ethnography has
been the advocacy of studying unfamiliar class-rooms, a case
argued, with P. Atkinson, in Fighting Familiarity (Hampton Press,
1995).
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