Learning Capoeira: Lessons In Cunning From An Afro-Brazilian Art - Couverture souple

Downey

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0195176979 ISBN 13 : 9780195176971

Editeur : Oxford University Press Inc, 2005

Synopsis

Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art is a provocative look at capoeira, a demanding acrobatic art that combines dance, ritual, music, and fighting style. First created by slaves, freedmen, and gang members, capoeira is a study in contrasts that integrates African-descended rhythms and flowing dance steps with hard lessons from the street. According to veteran teachers, capoeira will transform novices, instilling in them a sense of malicia, or "cunning," and changing how they walk, hear, and interact.
Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on author Greg Downey's extensive research about capoeira and more than ten years of apprenticeship. It looks at lessons from traditional capoeira teachers in Salvador, Brazil, capturing the spoken and unspoken ways in which they pass on the art to future generations. Downey explores how bodily training can affect players' perceptions and social interactions, both within the circular roda, the "ring" where the game takes place, as well as outside it, in their daily lives. He brings together an experience-centered, phenomenological analysis of the art with recent discoveries in psychology and the neurosciences about the effects of physical education on perception. The text is enhanced by more than twenty photos of capoeira sessions, many taken by veteran teacher, Mestre Cobra Mansa.
Learning Capoeira breaks from many contemporary trends in cultural studies of all sorts, looking at practice, education, music, nonverbal communication, perception, and interaction. It will be of interest to students of African Diaspora culture, performance, sport, and anthropology. For anyone who has wondered how physical training affects our perceptions, this close study of capoeira will open new avenues for understanding how culture shapes the ways we carry ourselves and see the world.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

Capoeira is the most elaborate martial art of the African Diaspora, a spectacular combination of dance, acrobatic kicks, and evasive maneuvers. Typically played as a game in which two players vie to control space, demonstrate superior mobility, and trip, kick, or head-butt each other to the ground at a moment of vulnerability, capoiera resembles a combination of acrobatic dance, slow martial arts sparring, and improvised musical performance. Learning Capoeira is an ethnographic study based on participant observation and more than ten years of apprenticeship in the acrobatic martial art. Rather than treating capoeira on a sociologica or cultural level, this book takes an experience-centered approach towards exploring the effects of the art on a player's perceptions and social interactions outside the roda, the "ring" in which the game is played. The text is innovative by example, demonstrating how an experience-centered analysis and ethnographic apprenticeship might produce rich, compelling understanding of a distinctive cultural world.

Revue de presse

This book is about the changes students undergo as they learn the art. The results are striking. Using phenomoenolgical analysis, exploring physiological memory, and the tried and true personal anecdotes, Downey offers testimony that academia's shift to the personal has benefits. (Joshua M. Rosenthal. Latin American Research Review)

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press Inc
• Date d'édition: 2005
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0195176979
• ISBN 13: 9780195176971
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie