Bodies turning ‘into something rich and strange’

Abstract

While we live in a global environment of increasing ideological and material ruins, one way out of these ruins can be found in non-Western bodily practices that offer different logics of action. An ethnographic study of bodies practising African-Brazilian capoeira angola in Russia provides examples of rich and strange bodily becoming. The study exemplifies new types of postcolonial spatial relations between the global South and North. Bodies raised amid communist ruins begin something new as they step into capoeira classes. By playing tropical instruments, singing and moving in circular, spontaneous ways reminiscent of plants and animals, Russian bodies gradually turn into less anthropocentric ‘distant others’. The African-Brazilian practice is used as a tool of critique for the late capitalist setting. In a moment of extreme environmental precarity, practices like capoeira angola can inspire us to reconsider the linear logic of late capitalism. Slow, circular and down-to-earth movements (both social and physical) have more in common with cyclical vegetative growth than with linear capitalist progress. New kinds of bodies and logics of action emerge not only through technological innovation but also through the recycling of old practices in the most unlikely of places.