Capoeira: The History of an Afro-Brazilian Martial Art

28 COMPETING MASTER NARRATIVES
already adopting a Bahian perspective, acknowledging Bahian hegemony over actual capoeira forms, whilst
adepts from the Southeast often prefer to label their style as ‘contemporary capoeira’. 96
Different class and professional backgrounds further complicate the way the history of capoeira is told.
The modernization of capoeira has resulted in a multiplication of specialist discourses. Doctors,
psychologists, social scientists, administrators and sports teachers all comment on its practice, and try to
intervene through a variety of means. If the labour market for capoeira teachers has expanded enormously in
the last two decades, so has the competition between teachers. Many teachers who learned in the traditional
way from an old mestre, but who might not have achieved a formal education, feel threatened by instructors
who take degrees in physical education at Brazilian universities (whose curricula now include capoeira). In
this sense, myths like the burning of all archives reinforces the legitimacy of oral tradition, transmitted
through the traditional relationship between mestre and disciple. It precludes the falsification of the mestre’s
teachings through the use of other sources and reinforces the initiatory aspect of capoeira apprenticeship.
This ‘corporate’ discourse occasionally assumes an anti-academic posture, because of the contradictions
between the ‘foundations’ of capoeira and new ‘scientific’ evidence from sports sciences. A ‘traditional
capoeira class does not necessarily conform to the latest teachings of physical education. Mestres who want
to preserve their teaching method are thus cornered into a defensive position, because they are only too well
aware that these new contributions can constitute a potential challenge for them, devaluating their symbolic
capital.
If old mestres share therefore common interests as the guardians of tradition against outsiders, they do
not necessarily coincide in their views about the history of capoeira. Vehement disagreements result less
from different interpretations over the distant past, than from about their own role in recent history. Many
claim primacy in some achievement regarding the diffusion of capoeira, and inevitably their assertions clash
with claims from other mestres. Conflicts also arise over a common and long dead mestre, when competing
disciples claim to be the authentic defenders of his heritage. Often they challenge to what extent other, rival
students ‘really’ learned from him. In that respect all interviews with old mestres, albeit an crucial element
for the reconstruction of capoeira’s more recent past, are nevertheless as biased as any written, ‘outsider’
source, if only for different reasons. Furthermore, many students of capoeira history seem to ignore the
problem of ‘feedback’ in the mestres’ narratives. As with everybody else, their discourse changes over time,
according to shifts in their world views and to the new developments of the art. Any new information is
processed and integrated into their current interpretation. It is thus methodologically unsound to expect them
to separate neatly the knowledge they received through oral tradition from the information gathered through
other means. For instance, no mestre ever mentioned n’golo prior to Neves e Souza’s visit to Brazil and
Câmara Cascudo’s publications, and it is therefore fallacious to use later interviews, where mestres reflect
over that important new element, as ‘evidence’ of a genuine oral tradition remembering the distant capoeira
origins.
As we are going to see in more detail, the relationship between class and capoeira practice has become
increasingly intricate, as styles spread from their original constituencies to much larger audiences. Despite
this complex picture, another master narrative tends to read capoeira history as essentially overlapping with
class struggle. Analogous to ethnic or Afrocentric discourses, capoeira is constructed by the class discourse
as a synonym of resistance, but the ‘African’ or ‘black’ is substituted by the ‘people’. Its rational basis lies
in the fact that capoeira indeed constituted a counter-hegemonic practice in a variety of historical contexts.
The class discourse emphasizes these struggles and suggests that capoeira practice ‘is’, intrinsically,
‘resistance’, or ‘gymnastics of resistance’. 97 Although the re-appropriation of capoeira from the 1930s
onwards is usually recognized, there is a trend to minimize the involvement of upper-class males and the
links forged between capoeira gangs and politicians during the ‘golden age’ of the art. The exploitation