Vagrant Resistance: Syncretism and Rebellion – The first definition of Capoeira as fight/game appears in the first decade of the 19th century. The term continued, however, to indicate a broad spectrum of activities acting against public security and/or private property; including escape attempts as a crime against ownership of slaves.
Here it follows another piece of my last paper on the history of Capoeira – Capoeira: Origins, Development, and Global Diffision. This second part deals with the ethymology of the term Capoeira, but also with its connections with the tough times of the Brazilian transition from an Empire to a Republic.
As usual, please, feel free to leave your comments and critics. If you know about other sources, authors or line of thought, I really would like to talk about it.
Enjoy it!
Eurico
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Vagrant Resistance: Syncretism and Rebellion
The first definition of Capoeira as fight/game appears in the first decade of the 19th century. The term continued, however, to indicate a broad spectrum of activities acting against public security and/or private property; including escape attempts as a crime against ownership of slaves. In this way, not all criminal individuals were capoeiras (practitioners) in the sense of a fight/game, as Araújo emphasises, but all practitioners were outlaws (Araújo; 1997: 63).
Thereby, after the early 19th century, the term that initially indicated the “continuous resistance” in canhembos and quilombos, also pointed to the marginal groups residing in the urban centres. This viewpoint strengthens the cultural construction of Capoeira’s narrative as an instrument of rebellion, as well as the argument that the term ‘capoeira’ acts as an intercultural insignia binding together diverse ethnic minorities. Such a perspective also finds support in Araújo’s study, as the author notes that :
“From these identities based upon attitudes and actions it is possible to attribute the first conceptual definition of the term, that initially described fugitives who hid themselves in the bush-woods, called capoeiras, near the urban net, and that afterwards were extended not only to these [runaway slaves called Capoeira Blacks], but also to other marginal groups … now residing in the urban centres.” (Araújo; 1997: 64-5)
In the early 19th century the “Prince Dom João VI of Portugal, along with his entire court and 15,000 others, fled to Brazil, escorted by British ships” escaping Napoleon’s army. The British Empire “enjoying an industrial revolution that had been significantly financed by Brazilian gold, was becoming a world power and Portugal’s main ally against Napoleon” (Taylor; 2005: 275). Such support was not unpretentious and Britain started to lobby against the Portuguese slave trade.
Adding to these tensions within the international scenario, the arrival of the Portuguese Royal family into Brazil coincided with a growing perception of the numerous mass of Blacks, Negríndios and Caboclos as a threat to the establishment, as well as with a strengthened Brazilian abolitionist movement. This menace was intensified by the ruling classes’ awareness of the St. Domingue Revolution resulted in policies being written and police forces assembled in an explicit attempt to extirpate what was seen as insubordinate behaviour of these masses from Brazilian society.
Against that social/political backdrop the 19th century also unveiled the terms capoeiragem and vadiação1. The first was coined in a police report in 1872 and did not add much to the previous description of the capoeira individual, accept for the reinforcement of its illegal character (Araújo; 1997: 63). Conversely, the 1890 Brazilian Penal Code, despite singling out the practice as a crime, also enhanced the understanding of the term capoeiragem as a fight/game. Whilst, the term vadiação, regarded as a synonym for capoeiragem in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, was coined by practitioners reinforcing the playfulness of the practice (Caneiro, as cited in Araújo; 1997: 68).
Regardless of its first etymological appearances as a fight/game, in the 19th century, Capoeira remained a powerful tool in the hands of the excluded. Only this time the landscape was urban, and the threats were more bluntly put against the establishment, once the Crown was living in Rio de Janeiro.
The troublesome years of transition from an Empire to a Republic exposed Capoeira as deeply problematic act and philosophy affecting relations between the disadvantaged population and the ruling class as the ability to control this bellicose ethnic-mixed crowd and their weapon and means of expression was a crucial factor in effective rule. The Republican Party movement and its intellectuals were severe critics of the Empire’s incompetence in extinguishing social problems related to capoeira; and the usually public turmoil caused by its practitioners. Conversely, the Monarchists had not only gained the capoeira outfit’s support by abolishing slavery in 1888, they had also assembled the first capoeira military unit – A Guarda Negra [The Black Guard] (Soares; Texts from Brazil, n.14; pp. 45-52).
When the Republic was established in 1899 the connection of Capoeira with the previous establishment as well as with a large number of vagrant Blacks, Negríndios and Caboclos threatened the Republican powers. For these reasons Capoeira was criminalised in the 1890 Brazilian Penal Code which specifically addressed the capoeira individuals and their practices. Subsequently, the practice of Capoeira was persecuted and repressed until its extinction, chiefly in Rio de Janeiro and Pernambuco; states where Capoeira was deeply grounded in mobs, outfits and territorial disputes amongst Blacks and mixed race minorities. The only Capoeira that survived this period of persecution and repression was the one practised in Bahia, a region in the north-east of Brazil, which is the ancestral form of all Capoeira today, and displayed even then its interdisciplinary and playful features.
