Capoeira

Capoeira developed among enslaved and later freed Afro Brazilians, drawing on African, particularly Central and West African, movement, musical and combat traditions carried and adapted under slavery, and it is played rather than simply performed, inside the roda, the circle of participants who sing, clap and play the instruments, above all the berimbau, the single stringed musical bow whose rhythm governs the pace and style of the game unfolding at its centre.

Two players move through a continuous, largely non contact exchange of kicks, sweeps, evasions and acrobatic movement built around the ginga, capoeira's foundational rocking base step, a form that blends genuine martial application with dance like flow and playful deception so thoroughly that the three English words fight, dance and game, capture different true aspects of a single Portuguese speaking tradition that resists a clean translation into any one of them alone. Capoeira's history is one of active criminalisation followed by rehabilitation: practising capoeira was illegal in Brazil under laws targeting it explicitly by name into the early twentieth century, a documented history of legal suppression tied to its association with Afro Brazilian resistance and community organising, before the art was gradually legitimised and eventually promoted as Brazilian national cultural heritage across the following decades.

Whether and how far capoeira should be read as a religious or spiritually charged practice is a genuinely contested question in the scholarship rather than a settled fact either way, and the atlas states that disagreement rather than resolving it. Some capoeira lineages, particularly capoeira angola, the older and generally more traditionalist branch of the art associated above all with the mestre Pastinha lineage in Bahia, maintain explicit connections to Afro Brazilian religion, especially Candomble, invoking orixas, ancestral reverence and axe, vital spiritual force, within the roda's music and practice, and some practitioners describe their own capoeira as a genuinely spiritual discipline in continuity with these Afro Brazilian religious currents.

Scholars including John Lowell Lewis, whose ethnographic study of capoeira examines how the tradition's own participants and promoters construct and sometimes strategically deploy competing narratives about its meaning and origins, have argued that some of capoeira's claimed ancient African religious content reflects a degree of twentieth century reconstruction and romanticised narrative building, particularly as capoeira was reshaped for Brazilian national identity and later for international export, rather than a straightforwardly unbroken transmission of specific African religious practice. Both positions, capoeira as living continuation of Afro Brazilian spirituality and capoeira's spiritual content as substantially reconstructed and reinterpreted across its documented history of suppression and revival, appear in serious scholarship, and individual schools and practitioners today vary widely in how much religious content, if any, they bring to their own practice.