Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

208 CONCLUSION
African descent in the diaspora. It provides a link with ancestral practices. A capoeira roda allows one to
log into the homepage of an epic past and a glorious present. As such it is still apowerful marker of ethnic
(black), regional (Bahian) and national (Brazilian) identities, despite its expansion to new constituencies
that are none of these three. Capoeira therefore offers not only health and fun, but also spirituality in an
increasingly secularized world, just as it provides an anchor in a global context of dissolution and crisis of
traditional identities of class, gender, ethnicity and nation; hence its popularity in the multicultural
metropolises of the twenty-first century. Identities are defined in terms of the whole art (to be a capoeirista),
a specific style (for example to be an angoleiro), or a particular group. They are expressed in many ways,
from songs to T-shirts.
Globalization produces the dislocation of peoples and cultures. Growing fluxes of parcels and passengers
undermine the idea of culture being firmly rooted in a particular soil. Feeling of distance from one’s
‘original’ location of culture can result in the search of one’s roots, but also fuel exoticism. That is why the
development of capitalism in nineteenth-century Europe was accompanied by the growth of travel literature
and the interest in anthropological descriptions of ‘natives’ in distant continents. During the twentieth
century, exoticism—although now to a large extent commodified by the tourist industry—remains a kind of
inverted pursuit from the search for one’s own ‘roots’, the search for an imaginary homeland, where human
beings are still in a state of nature, unpolluted und without guilt, just like animals. Maybe this is another
reason why animal metaphors—chameleons, zebras, snakes, monkeys and birds—continue to be so
powerful in contemporary capoeira. They also help to define one’s own posture in the debate over the wider
meaning of capoeira or the very concrete way in which a game evolves in a roda.
The term globalization is commonly used to suggest that the process is a recent, late twentieth-century
development. In fact, one can hardly imagine a more momentous process of dislocation of peoples and
cultures than the one produced by the slave trade for almost four centuries. The difference is that it
happened outside Europe in distant colonies; metropolitan cultures only superficially acknowledged the
social and cultural impact of the slave trade. They were not directly involved in the way they are now, when
the metropolises themselves have become multicultural societies. That is why metropolitan cultures now
need diasporic forms such as capoeira, which have accumulated a long experience of how to accommodate
cultural diversity whilst still preserving a core identity.
Outside Brazil, capoeira adepts often come from multicultural backgrounds and they are the ones who
seem to incorporate more rapidly the basic ginga than mono-lingual students. Practitioners from
monocultural background often struggle hard to grasp the meaning of what they are doing, because they are
not familiar with cultural translation. Adepts with their own diasporic biography, in contrast, are typically
forced to develop flexibility in terms of value-system, precisely what constitutes the ‘flexible waist’ (jogo
de cintura) in capoeira or wider Brazilian popular culture.
A creole, transatlantic practice such as capoeira is therefore particularly apt to provide an overarching
identity for diasporic people of any descent. A diaspora presupposes the existence of a real or imaginary
homeland to which its members aspire to return. The more globalized capitalism destroys and commodifies
‘original cultures’, the more people feel uprooted, and the more they start searching for ‘authenticity’. That
is why the search for one’s ‘roots’ has become so important today, and essentialists of all sorts enjoy
growing sympathy in many audiences. Yet, to paraphrase a slogan from postcolonial studies, more important
than the supposed roots of are the routes through which capoeira developed. Given that capoeira has not
only survived repression, conquered legality, and grown so much ever since, one can indeed say, that the
golden age of capoeira lies not in a distant past when the art was more ‘authentic’, but, as Nestor Capoeira
rightly asserts, the golden age of capoeira is today! 5