Capoeira and Candomblé

Capoeira and Candomblé PDF Author: Floyd Merrell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Capoeira is a unique music-dance-sport-play activity created by African slaves, and Candomble is a hybrid religion combining Catholic and African beliefs and practices. Together, they make up a coherent form of life in Brazil. This study involves the author's practice of and reflections on the arts of Capoeira and Candomble.

Capoeira

Capoeira PDF Author: Matthias Röhrig Assunção
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780714650319
Category : Capoeira (Dance)
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art now spreading over the rest of the world and this book, the only complete history of the art in the English language, traces the history of the martial art and examines its influence.

Yoruba Ritual

Yoruba Ritual PDF Author: Margaret Thompson Drewal
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253112737
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 536

Book Description
Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys -- sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.

African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil

African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil PDF Author: Scott Ickes
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048389
Category : History
Languages : pt
Pages : 341

Book Description
Examines how in the middle of the twentieth century, Bahian elites began to recognize African-Bahian cultural practices as essential components of Bahian regional identity. Previously, public performances of traditionally African-Bahian practices such as capoeira, samba, and Candomblé during carnival and other popular religious festivals had been repressed in favor of more European traditions.

Samba

Samba PDF Author: Barbara Browning
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253115362
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : fr
Pages : 226

Book Description
Barbara Browning combines a lyrical, personal narrative with incisive theoretical accounts of Brazilian dance cultures. While she brings ethnographic, historiographic, and musicological scholarship to bear on her subject, Browning writes as a dancer, fully engaged in the dance cultures of Brazil and of Brazilian exile communities in the U.S.

The Little Capoeira Book, Revised Edition

The Little Capoeira Book, Revised Edition PDF Author: Nestor Capoeira
Publisher: Blue Snake Books
ISBN: 9781583941980
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Nestor Capoeira, a long-time teacher of capoeira and noted mestre (master), begins this revised edition of his bestseller with an in-depth history of the Brazilian art, giving the most popular theories for the origins and purposes of this movement that combines the grace of dance with lethal self-defense techniques in a unique game-song structure. He discusses some of the most famous capoeristas and their influence on the art. In addition, he describes how the two major branches of capoeira (Angola and Regional) came about and the differences between them. The Little Capoeira Book’s clear descriptions of the game, or jogo, explain the actual application of capoeira, vaguely similar to sparring but very different in purpose and style. The music of capoeira, which is played during all jogo, is also examined, along with its main instrument, the berimbau. The author includes a how-to guide with photographs showing basic moves for beginners, with offensive and defensive applications for simple kicks, takedowns, advanced kicks and movements, head butts, hand strikes, and knee and elbow strikes. Each technique is vividly depicted with drawings that are easy to understand and learn from, and mestre capoeira includes an explanation of both Angola and Regional versions.

Ecstatic Encounters

Ecstatic Encounters PDF Author: Mattijs van de Port
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9089642986
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
"Reality does not comply with our narrations of it. And that is most certainly the case with the narrations produced in academia. An anthropologist in Bahia, Brazil, fears to become possessed by the spirits he had come to study; falls madly in love withan 'informant'; finds himself baffled by the sayings of a clairvoyant; and has to come to grips with the murder of one of his best friends. Unsettling events that do not belong to the orderly world of scientific research, yet leave their imprint on the way the anthropologist comes to understand the world. REflecting on his long research experience with the spirit possession cult Candomblâe, the author shows, in a probing manner, how definitions of reality always require the exclusion of certain perceptions, experiences and insights. And yet, this 'rest-of-what-is' turns out to be an inexhaustible source of amazement, seduction and renewal." --P [4] of cover.

Performing Brazil

Performing Brazil PDF Author: Severino J. Albuquerque
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299300641
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
These essays on Brazilian performance culture comprise the first English-language book to study the varied manifestations of performance in and beyond Brazil, from carnival and capoeira to gender acts, curatorial practice, and political protest.

The Hidden History of Capoeira

The Hidden History of Capoeira PDF Author: Maya Talmon-Chvaicer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292773587
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Capoeira, a Brazilian battle dance and national sport, has become popular all over the world. First brought to Brazil by African slaves and first documented in the late eighteenth century, capoeira has undergone many transformations as it has diffused throughout Brazilian society and beyond, taking on a multiplicity of meanings for those who participate in it and for the societies in which it is practiced. In this book, Maya Talmon-Chvaicer combines cultural history with anthropological research to offer an in-depth study of the development and meaning of capoeira, starting with the African cultures in which it originated and continuing up to the present day. Using a wealth of primary sources, Talmon-Chvaicer analyzes the outlooks on life, symbols, and rituals of the three major cultures that inspired capoeira—the Congolese (the historic area known today as Congo-Angola), the Yoruban, and the Catholic Portuguese cultures. As she traces the evolution of capoeira through successive historical eras, Talmon-Chvaicer maintains a dual perspective, depicting capoeira as it was experienced, observed, and understood by both Europeans and Africans, as well as by their descendants. This dual perspective uncovers many covert aspects of capoeira that have been repressed by the dominant Brazilian culture. This rich study reclaims the African origins and meanings of capoeira, while also acknowledging the many ways in which Catholic-Christian culture has contributed to it. The book will be fascinating reading not only for scholars but also for capoeira participants who may not know the deeper spiritual meanings of the customs, amulets, and rituals of this jogo da vida, "game of life."

Power in Practice

Power in Practice PDF Author: Sergio Armando González Varela
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336355
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira’s practice and performance.