Abstract
In contemporary capoeira groups, newcomers are symbolically ‘baptised’ into the community at a public ceremony called their Batizado (literally baptism) held during a festival. Novices play a game with a guest expert, get their first belt and thereafter they are members of their teacher’s group. Drawing on a long term, two-handed ethnography of diasporic capoeira contemporanea in the UK, including observation of 53 such festivals, their ceremonial features are analysed. At all the stages of the ‘welcome’, before, during and after the batizado, the topic of gender in capoeira contemporanea is explored. In the last 40 years, women have become enthusiastic participants and are core members of the groups we have studied. The article compares the sociological (symbolic interactionist) and anthropological approaches to ceremonies and rituals such as the capoeira batizado, drawing on Glaser, Strauss and Katz compared to van Gennep, Turner and MacAloon.
Highlights
In contemporary capoeira groups, newcomers are symbolically ‘baptised’ into the community at a public ceremony called their Batizado held during a festival
Capoeira as it has been known since the 19th century is generally agreed to have been a syncretic production in Brazil created by enslaved Africans
We have analysed the enculturation of the novice into capoeira as both a status passage, drawing on symbolic interactionist authors, which lasts up to 3 years, and a rite of passage lasting three to 4 days, at the festival that includes their batizado
Summary
The history of capoeira is not well documented. We draw on Assuncao (2005) whose scholarly account is generally accepted by both capoeira practitioners and historians. The origins lie in Africa: the instruments, the call and response singing, and the style of the embodiment are ‘African’ Capoeira as it has been known since the 19th century is generally agreed to have been a syncretic production in Brazil created by enslaved Africans. It existed on the plantations in the slave era, and after the enslaved Africans were freed in 1888, developed among African-Brazilians in the cities (Almeida, 1986; Hofling, 2019). An exdockworker, moved from Salvador de Bahia in the 1930s to Rio de Janeiro, the capital of Brazil (Machado, 2018) He taught capoeira formally to elite white men indoors who wore uniforms. We do not discuss angola here except for occasional contrastive comparisons
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