Photo taken at a 'Domingueira'. Project Learning from Brazilian Culture
After writing about the Volta Por Cima and the Brazil Sweden Cultural Exchange projects I received a few e-mails from people interested in this sort of social initiative in Capoeira. These new contacts made me think about the 4 Capoeira Thoughts proposal.
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The Social Role of Capoeira:
An Invitation to make local sense of a cultural practice in global spreading
If we are to contribute with and bring awareness to the role of Capoeira as an educative and social inclusive practice worldwide, we need to discuss the difficulties, particularities, and outcomes of these actions in local communities. Capoeira was born from attitudes of resistance against oppression and since then has been empowering the underprivileged people.
Today, the westernisation of the art is twisting its values to conform it with the ruling system’s agenda. Yet, I still believe some of the material and technological resources developed by exclusively profit-driven endeavours, can be used to fight these inversions fostering purposeful and humanitarian social actions.
Internet and other media means have been used, chiefly, in an attempt to spread empires; ‘corporation-like’ Capoeira groups and their mannerism-based identities amongst them. Consciously or not, the more Capoeira spreads, the more these media means and its practitioners twist its cultural and philosophical principles, and the more Capoeira is been conformed to western values.
I am inviting my counterparts to use Internet in a more horizontal way; leaving aside group’s flags; styles; fundamentalist identities; titles and military hierarchies. The aim is to discuss the worldwide spreading of Capoeira, the global forces acting upon it, and its local purpose as an empowering cultural practice.
From now on, the 4 Capoeira Thoughts is open to guest-authors approaching the social role of Capoeira. I hope to publish their posts, and to interview people with similar initiatives. As well as to promote their community based endeavours.
The 4 Capoeira Thoughts blog is a not-for-profit initiative supporting my PhD field research on Capoeira and Social Inclusion. My aim is to build a network of social active capoeiras collaborating in an on line Journal on issues of Capoeira philosophy, intercultural learning, social inclusion and education, that will endure even after my research is completed.
Whether you run a project with this profile, know someone else who does, or are keen to engage in a community based practice of Capoeira, please, contact me at: 4capoeirathoughts (at) gmail (dot) com
I am looking forward in learning and sharing more about Capoeira as a social inclusive and educative tool.
Axé!
Eurico Vianna
