Abstract
Capoeira, the African-Brazilian dance and martial art has enthusiastic devotees in Britain. Most practitioners are acutely aware of their capoeira embodiment, and have strategies to protect themselves from injury, and ways to seek treatment for any injuries they get. Drawing on data from a long-term ethnography and a set of 32 open-ended interviews with advanced students, the paper explores student strategies to prevent capoeira injuries, and their discoveries of effective remedies to recover from them, before it presents an analysis of their injury narratives using Frank's three-fold typology of illness narratives. The capoeira study therefore adds to the research on sports and dance injuries, and to the intellectual debates on the nature of narrative in research on illness and injury as well as exploring one aspect of the culture of capoeira students in the UK.
Highlights
Joelho is the Portuguese word for the knee
This paper draws on a body of interview material collected from students about the experience of injuries, strategies to avoid them and ways to deal with any injuries that do occur. These 32 interviews are set in the context of a 16 years long ethnographic study of Protective Embodiment and Occasional Injury contemporary capoeira as it is taught in two British cities—Cardiff and Bristol—by Mestre Claudio Campos, a Brazilian master
The ethnography is about capoeira as it is taught and learnt in English speaking countries far from Brazil (Stephens and Delamont, 2006a), but the data on injuries were collected by interviews
Summary
Joelho is the Portuguese word for the knee. Capoeira, the African-Brazilian dance-fight-game, uses a predominantly Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary, including songs in Portuguese so its serious students learn the Brazilian Portuguese names for its moves and for body parts like the knee. The knees are one of the body parts that practitioners of the African-Brazilian martial art capoeira report having trouble with Both teachers and students are familiar with knees getting injured, or throughout their regular training realizing that they are gradually more insidiously becoming painful. Games in the UK with strangers, who may have been trained in a more aggressive style, and all encounters in Brazil are likely to be fiercer and could involve more contact and more “real” take downs Such contrastive rhetoric works to stress how “safe” capoeira is here, as long as you concentrate, use dodges and protect yourself but outside the home club, there, it could be very dangerous. Capoeira has an extensive virtual presence, with films, DVDs, websites and music downloads enabling those far from Brazil to establish themselves in a global network (Delamont et al, 2017)
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