HEAD - ScottHead_Re-velações da falsidade

8/12/2019 HEAD - ScottHead_Re-velaes da falsidade

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Re-velaes da falsidade:

Pontes performticos entre o jogo de dentro e mundo afora

by Scott Head

Play, which for Richard Schechner lies at the heart of performance,

involves the transformation of lying and deceit, such that rather than the mere

negations of the truth, they become sources of affirmation; performance, in turn,

consists in the process through which the unreal world of the imagination

becomes actualized in the form of gestures, dances, words, masks, music and

narratives (Schechner 1994: 644). Such a perspective presents a challenge to

the anthropology of performance: namely, how to deal with this constitutive

duplicity of play/performance, if anthropological discourse is historically and

institutionally committed to the pursuit of the Truth?

This affirmation of the make-believe of performance presents a challenge

not only to established anthropological truths whatever those may be, but also

the very notion of Truth itself: not only the epistemological distinction between

true and false, but also the ethical capacity to distinguish between right and

wrong, as well as the aesthetic distinction between beautiful and ugly. Still, there

is no need to defensively sure up the walls of anthropological reason, moral

sensibility or good taste over against the falsifying impact of performance, or, in a

moment of panic, to jump over those walls and take up camp amongst the

postmodern followers of Nietzches Zarathustra and the like. For here Clifford

Geertz steps in to save the day, offering a deceptively simple answer: Namely,

one should start by relativizing both the truths and falsities in question,

distinguishing the experience-near conceptions of culturally specific

performances from the experience-distant conceptions of anthropological truth

and performance alike, such that each may be placed in their appropriate

context, and interpreted according to their local, inner logic.1 After all, if social

and cultural truths can be extracted from fictional tales literary critics make their

career out of such a practice then why should this be any different in the case

of the imaginary worlds enacted in and through cultural performances?

1Here, I am referring, more particularly, to Geertzs (1983) essay, From the Natives Point of

View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding; still, I see this as basically representativeof his overall approach.


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Even so, the particular cultural performance and related experience-near

concept to which I turn in this presentation puts a further spin on this ever-so-

elegant solution on the part of an interpretive anthropology: namely, I approach

the affirmation of falsity in performance through the performance of falsidadein

the danced fight and ritualized game known as capoeira angola. This notion,besides being directly affirmed in the singing that accompanies the game I,

viva a falsidade, camar... is also closely tied to a host of other terms used as

short-hands by practitioners to refer to the singular combination of ethics and

aesthetics embodied in the stylized movement of this art form malcia, manha,

malandragem, and maldade, to name the more common; whether enacted in

bodily movement or voiced in the stories told in its regard, falsidade and its kin

play off the shifting boundaries between the powers of the false at the heart of

performance, and the reality of disguised violence and feigned truces seen as

pervading the surrounding world no less than the game itself. Moreover, in its

refusal to be one thing or the other, to be limited to the game itself or its

surrounding world, falsidade implicates and challenges the truth-seeking gaze of

anthropology.

Here, we dont have to discover or pretend to discover the hidden

motivations animating the anthropological pursuit of truth to acknowledge the

challenge that arts ethics and aesthetics of falsidade presents to this disciplinary

gaze.2 The mere fact that for its practitioners, the falsidade of this art reflects the

falsity of its social milieu, renders the latter incapable of serving as the stable

ground of truth by which to comprehend and explain the significance of this art

through the unearthing of its social and historical context. At the same time, the

incorporation of such falsity into the movement of capoeira angola the

embodiment of falsity in and through such movement questions the objective of

fixing the meaningful action of this practice in the form of a text considered

the necessary condition for such actions to be treated as an object of science.3

2 This might well be the point of departure for our post-modern in this case Foucault-inspired

alter-egos referred to above: to turn the direction of the interrogating gaze around, viewinganthropology through the lens of falsidade, thereby recasting the disciplines pursuit of Truth, orwill-to-knowledge, as but the normalizing counterpart to the violently objectifying thrust of adiscourse of power. Yet this would be to rely on an otherwise similar model of truth as anunderlying reality waiting to be revealed from behind the deceptive realm of appearances.3"Meaningful action is an object for science only under the condition of a kind of objectification

which is equivalent to the fixation of a discourse by writing" (Ricoeur 1979). Clifford Geertz


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In this way, the performance of falsidade renders problematic not only the

contextualization of this falsifying movement, but also its textualization

(Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs 1988; Hanks 1989) which doubles and

redoubles the challenge that such falsity the falsity of performance no less

than the performance of falsidade -- presents to the anthropological pursuit of

truth.

Perhaps needless to say, this resistance that falsidade and its kin offers

to the anthropological gaze has not led to a relinquishing of the attempt to

interpret the art form; rather, the very enigma it presents has attracted the

attention of numerous anthropologists myself included each of which, in his

or her way, has more or less successfully revealed some hidden, or at least not

immediately, apparent aspects of the art form secrets that are themselves

closely linked to the art forms propensity for deception.4 Here, the overall aim of

such interpretations is to point out connections between the art forms inner logic

and that of its surrounding world both the historical world amidst which the art

form itself emerged and through which it passed, and the present-day world

amidst which practitioners of the art form live.5

These readings of the art form certainly have their merits, revolving in

large part around the effort to read social, cultural, and historical significance

back into an art form that is in constant risk of being reduced to the status of a

depoliticized cultural commodity and/or rule-bound competitive sport. Yet in the

(1973, 1983) is one of the principle anthropologists for elaborating the concept of culture-as-text;see also J. Langdon (1999), for a more specific discussion of the problem of fixing oralnarratives in textual form, and the importance of literary as opposed to literal translations inevoking the non-verbal components of oral performance.4To cite only social scientific books and dissertations on capoeira of at least an anthropological

bent: Browning 1995; Dossar 1994; Downey 2005; Head 2004; Lewis 1992; Reis 1997; Tavares1984; Vieira 1995. For more strictly historical accounts of capoeira, see, in particular, Assuno2005; Dias 2001; Soares 1994, 2004.5Thus, capoeiras aesthetics of deception has been related to aesthetic conceptions held in parts

of Africa from which elements of the art are thought to have originated; to the history of slavery, inwhich deception was necessary for survival, particularly for those bent on confronting the lie of

their imposed condition and the racist presuppositions on which it was based; and to theaftermath of slavery leading up to the present, in which the structural effects of racialdiscrimination persist even as its forms mutate, such that even the sometimes truly held belief inracial democracy comes to serve as yet another masking of racial inequality. Capoeiras inneraesthetics of deception has also been related more directly and pragmatically to contemporarytimes: here, learning to deal with the propensity for deception within the game of capoeira helpsits practitioners avoid, see through, and/or manipulate the much more dangerous propensity fordeception in the real world; and, from a less individual-centered and more group-centeredperspective, that aesthetic has been read as an embodied expression of an Afro-Brazilian, and/orAfrican Diasporic, identity-in-the-making, which relies at least as much on indirect forms ofcultural resistance as it does on direct forms of social and political confrontation.


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very effort to question the clichs to which capoeira risks being reduced, an

overriding clich creeps back into these academic analyses: that of there being

a more-or-less neatly drawn boundary between the game itself and its

surrounding world, between which the ethnographer steps, one foot on either

side, playing the mediating role of a participant-observer capable of reading the

inside game and the outside world, each in terms of the other. In and of itself,

this assumption might be defended as a convenient and perhaps unavoidable

methodological fiction. Still, I would argue that besides lending itself to be linked

to more dubious clichs,6 this fixation of or indeed, fixation on the

boundaries of performance, inadvertently tends to occlude the emergent

dimension thereof.

Much of the innovative work in the anthropology of performance has been

oriented toward extending its reach beyond clearly delimited play and

performance spaces towards more ambiguously framed performative acts

immersed in, and/or only momentarily set apart from, the flow of everyday

experience; in different ways, Turners (1974, 1982) social dramas, E.

Goffmans (1985) attention to the theatre and micro-rituals of everyday life, and

the shift in R. Bauman and C. Briggs (1990) concerns from clearly marked

genres of verbal art to the performative dimensions of day-to-day conversation,

are all representative of this broadening of the purview of what counts as

performance. Whereas, in this paper I seek to flesh out equally unstable

moments in which the limits between play and not-play are tested from within

what only appears to be a neatly bounded performative space for those

assuming the safe role of spectators moments which, at least for a moment,

exceed and disrupt the spatial and interpretive boundaries that would contain

them.

Here, then, my focus is not on the conventional metaphors by which

practitioners relate particular features of the game to the world beyond its

6The persistence with which it surfaces amidst otherwise quite different perspectives, suggests

the ease with which it lends itself to be linked to more dubious clichs forming around thisinner/outer distinction: even when not taking the form of an inner realm of subjective experienceand ultimately uncontaminated by the outer realm of deceiving appearances and the continualplay of power, or the inverse form of belief in a class-based and need-based consciousnessrising up to sweep away the illusions of bourgeois subjectivity, how, one skeptic asks, can onenot believe in a powerful concerted organization, a great and powerful plot, which has found theway to make clichs circulate, from outside to inside, from inside to outside? (Deleuze 1989:209).


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bounds, or the conventionalized actions whose relative fixity allows the

anthropological observer to read and write the performance in the form of a text.

Rather, it pursues more momentary and singular acts inserted within the overall

context of performance, yet never repeated in (quite) the same way actions

more along the lines of what Vincent Crapanzano, in dialogue with Victor Turner,

refers to as the punctuations of the liminal its internal disjunctions

(Crapanzano 2004: 61) . Such acts, which in the case of capoeira angola, play

between the feigning of (virtual) violence and the veiling of actual violence, are

located at once in the midst of performance and at its limits. As such, they mark a

shift in theoretical concerns away from the criteria by which to interpret deep

play (Geertz 1973) towards a heightened attention to the boundary-threatening

effects of dark play (Schechner 1993) and the emergent edge of performance. 7

Thus, returning to the encounter between the falsity of performance and

the truth of anthropology with which this paper began, let me reformulate its

overall aim: in approaching the affirmation of falsity through the performance of

falsidade in capoeira angola, it endeavors to 'stage' certain ongoing processes

and punctuations through which truth is folded into falsity and the inverse, and

to do so in ways that actively confound naturalized associations between the

realm of Truth and either the inner logic or outer context of performance.

With this overall aim in mind, the paper is organized around three such

storied enactments, each of which stages a different mode of ethnographic

7Bauman and Briggs (1990) link the emergent dimension of performance to (the process of) its

contextualization , insofar as the meaning of performance arises in relation to the overall socialinteraction in which it occurs. Focusing on verbal performances in particular, they argue that farfrom merely reflecting an outer, independently established context, that such conversations,narratives, and the like are capable of providing clues as to which dimensions of that otherwiseabstract context are particularly relevant with regard to the performance at hand; and in sodoing, they play an active role in both constructing and transforming that very context. I wouldtake their argument a step further, in two related directions. First, I would emphasize thatperformance emerges not quite through or alongside its contextualization, as they imply, butalways just in advance thereof: here, the process of contextualization would itself involve a

retrospective analysis a backtracking toward the conditions which gave way to theperformance and influenced the particularities of its emergence, which for that very reason,always misses out on the performance as it occurs. Second, in extending their analysis to non-verbal, embodied performances, I would emphasize the greater degree of ambuiguity involved insingling out relevant contextualization cues, and hence the more performative nature of theinterpretations thereof. Here, then, I seek not only to foreground the unpredictable, creativedimension of performance itself, but also to suggest that analysis itself must give way tofabulation it must itself engage with the falsity of performance if it is to allow for the actualemergence of performance to be glimpsed. For an extended and quite lively discussion ofemergence, not only with respect to performance theory and bodily movement, but also scientificdiscourse and invention, see B. Massumi 2002.


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engagement. Before jumping into the first one, however, I should note a clich

that my own approach, as thus far presented, risks falling into: that of purporting

to capture or evoke the truth of performance at the moment of its emergence,

uncontaminated by the clichs of academic knowledge, no less than those of

popular belief. It is with that clich of an uncontaminated view in mind that the

first story begins or had it begun from the moment I first set out to write it?

Uma vista parcial...

You, the audience whether you are doing some evening sightseeing in a

foreign country or coming home after a days work at your job as a janitor for a

local travel agency; making the first of your night-shifts rounds in your grey

uniform and tall black boots, or burning some time in your short red dress before

taking on a different kind of night-shift; shining shoes on the streets to survive, or

sniffing glue to escape the pressures of survival have likely seen capoeira

before. Rarely if ever have you seen it played in the open air of a downtown

square here in the city of Rio de Janeiro not long after sunset, however, as you

encounter it now. Many of those out on the street around you pass by with little

more than a passing glance, whether through an unshaken adherence to routine

or ineptness in the art of tarrying. But you were looking for a diversion, perhaps

without realizing it, and something peculiar about this particular performance

caught your eye and ear.

You may have seen capoeira at the gymnasium of your childrens school,

in a night-club, on television or film, in a brochure given to you only that morning

at your beach-side hotel, or in the pictures of one of the many magazines

devoted to capoeira pilfered from the local newsstand. Indeed, if the latter, you

need only look at the front and back covers to find the two principle faces of

contemporary capoeira depicted and disseminated by the media. On the front

cover, you are likely to find the picture of a beautiful, young, white (and typically

blonde) woman either executing a capoeira movement or playing a berimbau a

bow-shaped musical instrument that has become indelibly linked to the art.

Here, capoeira consists of a beautiful and alluring dance commemorating the

unconstrained sensuality of Brazilian culture, in which fighting is only simulated,

and in which women are thus welcome to play just as men are invited to come


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meet them. Conversely, if you flip over such a magazine to its back cover, the

otherface of capoeira will all-too-likely be displayed. This inverse image, more

likely taking the form of a drawing, depicts a number of young men with bulging,

tattooed muscles, brown (or merely sun-tanned?) skin, and scowling faces

which happen to match the disembodied grimace of the Bad Boy clothing logo

which the image is advertising playing capoeira, at least one of whom is

performing a gravity-defying jump or leaping round-kick in the air; this version of

capoeira thus contains the otherwise threatening bodies of marginals within the

harmless form of a commodity, even as it lends bodily form to bellicose dreams

of boundless power.

You have only to open the magazine, in turn, to find the popularized

version of capoeiras history corresponding to each of these two predominant

images. In the one case, the beautiful dance and mock fight is likely to be

contrasted to capoeiras former association with slaves and knife- or razor-

wielding marginals who used capoeira to wreak revenge on their masters or

innocent bystanders on the streets of the larger cities in colonial Brazil. In the

other case, this modern spectacle of physical force, speed, and masculine

bravado is distinguished from what was once a harmless form of amusement

played by slaves and their descendents in their free time. While seemingly

opposed, then, these mass-mediated versions of capoeiras history double over

into one-another like inverted images of the same overall narrative: ultimately,

it matters little whether capoeira is a dance masquerading as a fight or a fight

disguised as a dance, so long as its movement from the past into the present is

cast in the narrative of history-as-progress .

But back to the art before you now: While there are no scantily-clad

women or gravity-defying acrobatic leaps you have come to associate with

capoeira, the game before you exudes a combination of playfulness and

solemnity that is uncommon enough to interrupt the habitual rhythms of your feet

and thoughts. You stop to watch, letting the feelingful tones of these sonic and

visual cadences slip momentarily into your corporeal consciousness, if only to be

expulsed as meaningless detritus in the next.

You see a number of those involved in the performance playing musical

instruments, three of which are berimbaus bow-shaped instruments with a

different size gourd attached to each of them, which youve heard come from the


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northeastern state of Bahia. The players of the instruments eight in all, you

eventually count stand in a shallow arc or line, comprising the flattened side of

an otherwise open circular space some four or five meters in diameter, known as

the roda. The boundary of the roda is made up of the mostly sitting and mostly

uniformed bodies of other practitioners waiting their turn to play; behind them,

you and the rest of the audience stand, along with some of the other

practitioners, who havent yet found themselves places to sit, collectively

enclosing the performers within a wall of bodies of varying permeability. Even as

you take in such details of the overall scene, the lyrics of the call-and-response

singing that accompanies the game also filters into your awareness: Oi, sim, sim,

sim / Oi, no, no, no / Hoje tem, amanh no ; the other players, along with

scattered members of the audience, respond in unison to the musician voicing

these words with a first-rising-then-falling pitch and tone that echoes and

accentuates the lead singers first line: Oi, sim, sim, sim / Oi, no, no, no.

Because of the density of the crowd and the constantly shifting positions

of the players relative to your line of vision, you only catch glimpses of the

interchange of movements between those presently playing: in this case, two

men of roughly the same age, one with long hair and clearly white, the other

with a shaved head and just as clearly black, even by the more flexible

Brazilian categories of racial perception. Your constantly interrupted vision

accentuates the difficulty of getting a clear view of what is going on, given the

variable blindspot produced by the constant movement between the players

themselves as their bodies twist and turn around, beneath, and over each-other

at varying degrees of proximity, blocking your view of one player even as the

other players actions come momentarily to view, in a prolonged play of

revelation and concealment. Indeed, the not unpleasing sense of disorientation

this play induces is further accentuated by the enigmatic nature of the

movements themselves. One moment, they appear as a slow-paced, ritualized

exchange of intricately interconnected slow-motion kicks that are ducked

underneath with back-bending twists of the body executed close to the ground,

only to transition without a definite break into a quicker paced, upright game

involving a continual dancing in and out of the rhythm interspersed with feigned

attacks and back-and-forth dodges of the upper torso. But no sooner than it

begins to make sense, to become a patterned perception, it shifts once again


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into somewhat slowed down, apparently more strategic game, more like a

chess-game played with bodies than a choreographed dance or fight except for

the lightning-quick kicks and attempted sweeps interspersed within such

movement.

Finding your view once again blocked, you nudge up nearer to the game,

only to find one of the players pressed back up against the edge of the roda right

in front of you, apparently cornered by the other, and evidently disconcerted by

his inability to maneuver his way out. As other members of the audience crowd

in behind you to view the heated-up action, you get caught in something of a tight

spot yourself, which draws your attention away from the game to your own now

vulnerable presence. The intensity of the moment is palpable, as another

uniformed practitioner presently standing with you in the audience exclaims

repeatedly, isso que a realidade! Ave maria, isso que a realidade!Meanwhile, your mobility constrained and your attention momentarily distracted,

you find yourself unable to avoid the impact of the player trapped in front of you

as he comes tumbling backwards, having just been kicked square in the chest

while stretching one of his arms upwards in what seemed to be some sort of

failed gesture of truce.

As you recover from your fall, the musician still leading the same call-and-

response song calls out: Olha a pisada de Lampio / Hoje tem, amanh no;

and the audience responds, Sim, sim, sim, no, no, no. From the scattered

laughter coming from the crowd around you, you surmise something else is up

besides the reference to the legendary bandit-turned-popular-hero, and following

the line of sight of those laughing, you notice a foot-size smudge on the shirt of

the player who collided with you, who has just stood up pride clearly hurt but

body intact; if for a moment, your eyes meet his, I can not say, for I am not quite

sure who it was that I tumbled into that evening upon being kicked out of the

roda.

* * *

No sooner than this initial view of capoeira has been offered, it must be

dissembled, for the particular perspective that you, the anonymous reader,

would have of capoeira resists reduction to a uniformly shared perspective. Of

course, this could also be said of the exoticizing look of a tourist, the scrutinizing


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look of a policeman, the distracted look of a prostitute, the hallucinated look of a

so-called menino de ruaout watching those roda while sniffing glue, and the like:

Any one of these looks exceeds the typifications to which they appeal no less

than they differ from one-another. And yet, these otherwise plural viewpoints are

at the same time informed by a number of clichd images, which, far from

passively consumed, exert an impact upon the perceptions of those confronted

with them, time after time, inciting us to perceive the art form in a certain way or

ignore it accordingly, as something already known, classified, and thence

generally occluded from our intentional field of vision. Far from assuming the

mere guise of reality, which once lifted, reveal an underlying truth, such image-

clichs actively in-form our perceptual processes, channeling our looks through a

cultural gaze, and thereby constituting the world as a spectacle to be

apprehended by the eye (Silverman 1996: 175). In large part, it is over against

that overriding gaze that this initial view of capoeira angola is offered as a

counter-figuration. Rather than straightforwardly depict this traditional style of

capoeira in opposition to some other equally realistic description of the

modernized style, it overtly fabulates both descriptions in different ways: it

decomposes the latter in terms of a limited number of image clichs and

narrative clichs that corroborate their meaning, even as it composes the former,

traditional style in terms of a constantly shifting flow of partial perceptions,

culminating in the doubly-impacting kick.

In ending with that kick, the initial view seeks to tie the questioning of

that gaze and with it, the dominant fiction (Silverman 1996: 178-9) that

informs it, emblematized earlier in two versions of the narrative of history-as-

progress offered in the typical capoeira magazine with the rupturing of the

more specifically ethnographicfiction of providing an authoritative perspective on

the scene at hand. For, although both the description of the overall scene and

the narrative of the game derive from actual memories and observations, they

nonetheless had to be stitched together in the form of a story told to you, the

reader-turned-virtual-audience-member a story that ends precisely at the

moment I, the practitioner-turned-ethnographer, came crashing into your own

scripted position, a position I could not possibly have occupied at the moment the

narrated event took place.


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Having ended the first story with the upsetting of the boundary between

observing the art and being impacted upon it, let me note that this is not the

same boundary as that between what practitioners refer to as thejogo de dentro,

or inside game, and the mundo afora, or world outside. For, the jogo de dentro

is actually more of a game inside the game, itself separated from the outside

world by thejogo de fora, or outside game. Yet, although the jogo de fora lies

between the inside game and the world outside, it is nonetheless the jogo de

dentro that concentrates the art forms liminality its propenity to subsist bitwixt

and between, and thereby elude, neat distinctions between the imaginary and

the real, subjectivity and objectivity, and the like (V. Turner 1982; R.

Schechner 1994). For the term jogo de dentro does not designate an easily

observable or neatly bounded aspect of the game, so much as an ambiguously

defined but deeply felt experientialquality that emerges in but is not limited to

the constant interchange of offensive and defensive movements between

players. For the fluid yet deceptively dangerous nature of the game at once

iconically resembles and indexically points to the falsidade of the world outside,

even as it is closely identified with the subjective state of relaxed readiness that

the art form is thought to cultivate. As such, this quasi-subjective, quasi-objective

nature of the jogo de dentro also lends itself less to being straightforwardly

described than to being storied, for the story-telling process itself shares

something of the inherently elusive, tricksterly quality of that game.8

Consequently, it is to one such story that I now turn.

Olhos roxos, humor negro...

It is precisely the unstable and unfixable nature of bodies inperformance which demands attention at this point in thedevelopment of bodily discourses indeed, we must begin not onlyto let the body go, but also to revel in its absence, and in the traces

engendered by its passage from presence to absence(Giplin 1996: 106).

8The trickster character is the personification of this storytelling process: not easily defined, not

readily categorized, forever untamed, nor given to capture in charts and diagrams (Scheub 1998:271). Given this link between storytelling and this personification of deception, it is not surprisingthat Crapanzano compares ethnographers to one such trickster-god: "The ethnographer is a littlelike Hermes: a messenger who, given methodologies for uncovering the masked, the latent, theunconscious, may even obtain his message through stealth (Crapanzano 1986: 51).


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I was once told a story regarding one set of traces engendered by the

interplay of moving bodies by a slight-built man of indeterminate age while sitting

at a bar up on an urbanized hill overlooking the densely populated area on the

periphery whose periphery? one could well ask of the city of Rio de Janeiro,

known as the Baixada Fluminense.

The audience to the story consisted of a handful of this mestre-turned-

narrators students sitting around a lopsided table at the bar; we had just finished

practicing movements with him in a makeshift space with an unfinished roof and

rough concrete floor above the bar. The series of events to be recounted to us

that evening as we sat around joking and drinking, recuperating from one of his

typically excruciating classes, had occurred up on a hill not unlike this one, only a

few thousand kilometers distant, in the near-ruins of what had once been afortress just above a neighborhood near the northeastern city of Salvador, Bahia,

called the Pelourinho:

Eu j vi muito feiticaria nos jogos dos velhos mestres, e nem sonharia em

entrar na roda dos antigos quando fica quente. Uma vez vi Joo Grande

jogando com Curi ... pum, pum, pum [ele acompanha sua descrio verbal com

gestos dos ombros e braos], Curi jogando seu jogo fechadinho , e Joo

Grande com seu jogo grande , de grande movimentos. Nem eu nem

Armandinho que 'tava sentado ao meu lado vimos alguma maldade acontecerdentro do jogo deles. Mas, quando a gente voltou p'ra casa do Grande Mestre

pra dormir, ns reparamos que seu Joo 'tava com um olho quase fechado. Eu,

sendo Bigode, fiquei na minha, mas Armandinho, na mandinga dele, chegou a

comentar no olho do Grande:O qu aconteceu ai, mestre? Ah, no meu olho?

Alguma coisa da rua entrou nele quando eu 'tava andando na rua, e eu fiz assim

[our narrator scratches his eye] e arranhou Ah, sim, claro, pois , pode crer,

mestre, comentou Armandinho, com a maior cara de pau.

At this point, our own mestre-turned-narrator paused to finish his glass of

beer, and seeing that the bottle from which we were serving ourselves was

empty, turned to the owner of the bar who was sitting with us to get another

one. (The owner was a capoeirista himself, now retired as he liked to say; he

had made the money to buy the bar from touring the United States and Europe

for some years as a member of Oba Oba, a dance troupe known for combining


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capoeira and samba into a seamlessly choreographed spectacle of rhythm,

force, and flesh, thereby portraying the unique vitality and sensuality of Brazilian

culture and its mystical African roots or something to this effect, according to

my recollection of the description from the troupes brochure he once gave me).

Our mestre waited for the owner to return with a new bottle, and filled back up all

of our cups and then his own, before continuing:

A, no dia seguinte, tinha outra roda dos mestres, e Joo Grande e Curi

jogaram de novo -- e claro que o olho do Joo Grande, com seus poderosos

feitios, j tava quase normal. Tum, tum, tum, saiu um jogo mas rapido do que

no dia anterior mas , de novo, no parecia haver nenhum golpe p'ra valer.

Mesmo assim, no dia seguinte, no final do evento, Curi chegou na roda com

culos escuros, e j 'tava de noite. Pois dessa vez, Armandinho, espertinho que

ele , perguntou de novo o qu tinha acontecido, e Curi respondeu que tomouo onibus a noite anterior, o motorista tinha freiado to rpido que ele bateu com

o olho na cadeira de frente. Mas que azar, bat o olho sem nem bater o nariz?!

Pois , azar mesmo, Curi disse, mas seu sorriso maroto deu outra resposta.

* * *

Without black eyes, how may we look at the night?(Bachelard 1987: 77)

Among other things, what fascinates me is how this story invokes a

sorcerous realm of embodied action mandinga that obfuscates perception,

even as it renders the after-effects of such actions visible. It thereby suggests

there is much more to capoeira Angola than can be seen by the untrained eye

or even by the trained eyes of such experienced Angoleiros as the narrator of

this story and his friend. Indeed, one might well question why in both cases it

was an eyethat was targeted by unseen blows: whether it was pure chance, or a

basic knowledge of the susceptibility to bruising of that area combined with the

desire to leave a mark or whether those blows were not also intended as veiled

violations of the act of seeing itself. The latter was less improbable than one

might imagine, given the active role that the lookplays inthe game, no less than

out. Whether or not one considers the targeting of those eyes in that exchange

of blows to be significant in itself, the quote below attests to just how active a role

the eyes play in the game, at least as seen by the author of an article on


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capoeira in a literary magazine published in 1906, over a decade after the public

presence of the capoeiras was forcefully eradicated from the streets of what was

then still the countrys capital:

A alma da capoeira o olhar, uma esgrima subtil, agil; firme,attenta em que a retina o florete flexivel penetrante indo quasidevassar a inteno ainda occulta, o desejo, apenas, pensado,voltada sempre para o adversario apanhando-lhe todos osmovimentos, surprehndendo-lhe os mais insignificantes ameaos,para desvial-os, em tempo, com a destresa defensiva dos braos,em rebates lpidos ou evital-os com os desvios lateraes e osrecuos saltados de corpo, leve, sobre ponta de ps, at facultar eperceber a aberta e entrar, para vr como para contar como foi,segundo o calo proprio (L. C. 1906).

While the author of this passage begins his article differentiating capoeira

from other martial arts in terms of its primarily defensive nature, his subsequentdescriptions of the game subtly suggests otherwise.9 Here, for instance, in

describing the way players use their eyes as instruments by which to disclose

one-anothers intentions, not only to defend against potential attacks, but also to

pierce the others defenses, this author offers insight into how suddenly such

attentiveness can be turned to offensive purposes from avoiding a surprise

attack to perceiving an opening for such an attack oneself. Indeed, his

reference to the act of entering such an opening blurs the difference between

perception and action, as the attack is itself figured as an exploratory act

through the popular phrase with which he associates it to see how it is, to tell

how it was.

In any case, the ludic exchange of black eyes recalled in the story calls

attention to both the underlying danger of the game and the delight in

dissimulating that danger (and its occasionally painful consequences) both in and

out of the game. It thereby attests not only to the hidden violence of the game,

but to the doubled veiling and unveiling of that violence within this humorous

account of a seemingly innocent game or dance. Here, the relation between

9 That article offers perhaps the most vivid view of capoeira as played a full century ago still

available to us in the present although in the paragraph just previous to this one, the authorlaments the fact that practitioners of his time no longer take their amor a arte, or love for the artto the extremes they once did. This inserts a note of ambivalence into his words, suggesting thatthey are less a description of an aspect of the game as immediately present to him than a poeticevocation of the art as already passing into the past and resurrected through the powers of hispenned imagination.


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sorcery and dance is doubled over into that between dance and dialogue, as in

offering such transparently fabricated accounts regarding the ever-so-mundane

origins of their black eyes, these mestres effectively transformed such potential

indices of their vulnerability into further instances of their renowned skill in

deception in and out of the game, verbally no less than bodily.10

There is clearly something ever so boyish about the whole affair the

humor gleaned from the elder practitioners bruises, no less than the ever-so

mundane causes given as excuses for the bruises. After all, such explanations,

as with the use of sunglasses, only drew further attention to the bruises they

outwardly concealed, much as laughter itself often reveals the very anxieties it

seeks to cover up. Yet here, the humor of their responses was no doubt

intended; it is not despite the humor of the excuses given in their regard but

through it that we may feel out the inner pulses of the art form. Not so much

underneath that strange mixture of (rough) play, humor, and concealment as

suffusingit, there lies a darker reference to something that cannot be clearly or

concisely stated without dispelling its constitutive ambivalence, something lying

at the margins of public consciousness like the bruised flesh around those eyes.

We may take the relation between the story and the events narrated

therein as exemplary in this regard. More than highlighting the contagious nature

of that delight in deception as it crossed over from the game into the players'

mock-attempts to verbally cover up and deny their playful exchange of violence

and thereby extending the art of dissimulation beyond the narrow bounds of the

game the narrating of the encounter itself became infected by that very delight,

and passed it on to his audience. Our narrator never stopped to explain whyhe

was telling the story or exactly what he meantby it or what had reallyhappened.

He did not attempt to exorcise the sorcery involved in the veiled acts recounted in

his story through a rationalizing explanation, treating the reciprocal exchange of

blows as, say, an overly literal application of the Old Testament ethic of an eye

for an eye. Instead, he enlisted the subtle magic of storytelling itself to recall the

no-less magical appearance of such bodily signs of unseen actions.

10While inverting the terms of the relation, this replication of the sorcery involved in the dance of

capoeira within the dialogue beyond it recalls Evan Pritchards classic description of the wiles ofthe witchdoctor, who does not only divine with is lips, but with his whole body. He dances thequestions that are put to him (in Taussig 1998: 249);

10whereas here, the dance of deception is

deployed to sidestep the questions posed in the ensuing dialogue.


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At the same time, he inflected that very act of storytelling with something

more than just the verbal semblance of mandinga through the back-and-forth

swaying of his upper torso as he recalled the rhythmic interchange of movements

between the elder mestres, even as he gave voice to the downbeat that

accompanied their movements (tum tum tum). In thus revivifying the rhythmicallydanced nature of mandinga, he produced an embodied trace of the games he

narrated, which not unlike those inscribed around the eyes of the mestres in

the wake of those games resists reduction to any particular (set of) meaning(s).

And, at the same time, those of us listening to our mestres story inflected what

he was saying (and how he was saying it) with our own embodied

understandings of the art, still reverberating quietly within us shortly after a

typically excruciating practice in the space above the bar. It was through the

interplay of these various dimensions, in which the act of narration became

thoroughly contaminated with that which is narrated, that the story evoked or,

more forcefully, invokeda fleshed-out sense of the sorcerous movement of which

it spoke.11

Folding over traces of movement from the game into its very texture, this

narrative medium of recollection inextricably intertwines the memory of

movement with the acknowledgement of its imperceptible underside, the all-too-

visible signs of the visceral impacts that interrupted such movement, the

repetition of feint and counter-feint in the dialogues ensuing in the aftermath of

the games, and the interplay of bodily movement and voice in the act of telling

the story itself. Rather than treat such traces those voiced in words no less

than those inscribed in flesh as but the desiccated husks of formerly sensate

movements and potentially painful blows, the point of retracing them through that

story is, in part, to get at how they are capable of becoming fleshed out or

rehydrated in or through more than one form of remembrance, and the multiple

manners in which those forms speak to one-another along with those

perceiving, listening, and/or reading them. And now, following that storys lead,

let me now dab my own hands more directly in the story-telling process no

11What generates much of the meaning of story is the tension between the linearity of narrative

movement and the complex cyclical rhythm into which images are worked. One can discern thisaesthetic tension in the body of the performer: she establishes the metronomic grid of the story asshe simultaneously depicts its actions. And the writer of story finds literary equivalents of theseoral techniques (H. Scheub 1998: 100).


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longer passing off my narrative as a description of the art, as in the first story, or

as a revoicing of a story told to me, as in the one just told, but instead aiming to

evoke my own experience of a game as it happened to me sometime in the

indefinite past of my fieldwork.12

The cutting edge of performance...

While playing a close-pressed game with my mestre to a relatively quick-

paced percussive rhythm which also happens to be referred to by the termjogo

de dentro one of the players of the bow-shaped berimbau instrument calls out,

Tira de l, bota c, O Dalila,; E de c, bota ali, O Dalila! , to which the audience

collectively responds, O Dalila!' The call-and-response song tells of a young

slave-girl named Dalila who is pointlessly ordered around, although I have also

heard it re-signified to indicate the passing of embodied knowledge from master

to student, or the passing of the energy of the music to the energy of the game,

or that of the energy of the roda (music and game combined) to the audience (if

there is one) and/or more diffuse outside world.

Meanwhile, my teacher-turned-opponent and I continue to move back and

forth and in and around one-another on our hands, feet, and heads, ducking and

returning kicks, headbutts, and sweeps, with little actual physical contact

although plenty of (all-too-)close calls on my end, moving upright and upside

down, twisting around from one side to the other and back again, seeking to

occupy each-others no-less-mobile blindspots. We are sweating and laughing

and gulping down the air around us, while our ears take in the mutually

reverberating sounds emanating from the taught metal strings, stretched-out

cowhides, metal cones, corrugated gourds and vocal cords; our bodies feed off

the oxygen and vibrations permeating the air that our bodies are displacing to

enrich our blood and the spirit of our movement.

12J. Fabian (1983) has called critical attention to some of the potential problems and problematic

assumptions involved in the once-standard practice of using the ethnographic present whichJ. Hastrup neatly summarizes as occluding the difference between the coevalness of fieldworkand the allochronism of writing (Hastrup 1990: 51). Still, as Hastrup goes on to argue, when weset aside the pretense of accurately mapping one space into the other (ibid), and activelyassume ethnographic representation a a creative process of reenactment or evocation (Tyler1986), then that very voice becomes one possible means by which ones former presence inthe field can exert an impact in ones writing.


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As the ribbed center of my opponent's body twists back and to the side to

avoid my attempted head butt, he takes his index-finger and slides it across the

front of my neck, exhaling in what sounds to me something like a screamed

giggle as he does so, followed by the whispered exclamation, Danou! --

Literally, You danced! but here he was clearly voicing the popular meaning of

the term, Youre dead! Caught up in the pressure of the moment, unable to

turn my head to witness the facial expressions of our audience, I am unsure of

how public his gesture of mock assassination is, but I sense quite clearly the

razor-sharp meaning of this sign, aided by the iconicity of his finger-nail with the

cutting edge of the razors that capoeiraruffians wielded as weapons, once upon

a time.

I sense this sign quite tangibly as it circumscribes the front of my neck, too

unexpectedly for me to respond with what would have been a good defensive

move of grabbing his finger-turned-knife and twisting it; but the gesture is gone

as fast as it came, the knife returned to its sheaf or retracted back into its

handle, and we continue to play as if nothing had happened, as if -- the

association would come to me subsequently in watching a chicken have its throat

cut as an offering in preparation for a sacred ceremony as if my life-force had

not been perfomatively ruptured to momentarily sacralize the rodaas a space in

which to remember and redeem the violence of times past.

We play on as if this interruption had not occurred; kicking, dodging,

dancing, feinting, spinning, twisting; inhaling and exhaling; defending, attacking,

and counter-attacking; acting, reacting, responding; continuing to elaborate on

our corporeal conversation initiated only minutes ago, yet stretched out into eons

through the intensity of the moment; and then, just as our game begins to slow

down in response to a change in the call-and-response singing, my opponent

performs the same movement on my neck again this time with two fingers

instead of one and minus the pressure of the fingernail and whispers to me as

he does so in a heavily accented English, "bandeide" [band-aid]. In the inverse

side of the very gesture he had used to slash my throat, he makes me laugh, and

yet lets me know that I'm still playing too open, as he managed to accomplish the

same attack once again. And this time, it is evident from the gargled laughs of

certain members of the audience that his gesture has not passed unperceived,

although their perception is not informed by quite the same ambivalence that his


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accompanying word and slight change in gesture entailed for me. I recall the

woman leading the call-and response singing as we play whose refrain now

runs, Oi ai ai, o sinh est chamando proceeding to improvise an explicit

reference to the gesture through her selection of one of the standard lines of this

song, calling out in counterpoint to the chorus,Oi, ai ai, tiriri faca de ponta, facafina de cortar, oi ai ai.

* * *

In this story, the fact that I -- a white, male, UnitedStatesian anthropologist

who had been studying capoeira Angola on and off for a number of years with

these practitioners was the victim of this act of iconic violence has both

everything and nothing to do with its overall significance. Everything, because

clearly, the color of my skin and my status as a gringoadded to the sharpnessof

the humor in my mestres gesture as witnessed by others, even as the personal

relation that had grown between us allowed me to share in that very humor

instead of only being hurt by it. And nothing, because his gesture was at the

same time an impersonal element of the game one that object-ively recalls

the history of the capoeiras through the tactile figuration of their favored

weapons, while at the same time being emblematic of the traditional style of the

game as presently played, in its emphasis on substituting overt displays of

physical violence with subtle yet sharp signs of potential violence.

And what of the personal incident that this gesture recalled for me, from

when I was an adolescent growing up in Brazil? A couple of years ago, while my

brother was paying me a visit here in Rio, we happened to walk by the very

supermarket where this event had taken place some twenty-five years earlier

while we were growing up in Rio, as the sons of parents abroad; at the time, I

was eleven or twelve years old, and he a couple of years older. That day, two so-

called meninos de ruacame up to us right in front of the supermarket, the one

nearest me grabbing me by the arm and demanding the contents of my pocket.

When I mutely resisted, he dragged his clenched hand down the skin over my

bicep, producing a searing sensation I at first could not identify. Stupidly, I again

tried to free myself, so he repeated the action with a quicker movement this time,

which also just caught the side of my chest, but he then withdrew when an

elderly woman coming out of the supermarket intervened, driving him off with her


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cane or umbrella, in what seemed like a scene taken straight from an after-

school television special. Only when my brother pointed to the blood trickling

down my arm and staining my shirt did I realize I had been cut by what must

have been a razor in the palm of my assailants hand. None of the cuts were

more than skin-deep, so we went straight home, and after cleaning them with

alcohol, I poured beer on them, as someone (my brother, most likely) had told

me that this would keep the scars from disappearing and I still have them

today, if you look reallyclose.

Of course, this little story has nothing directly to do with capoeira, but it

does indirectly recall the history of the capoeiras so-called hooligans known for

both playing the art and for wielding razors while doing so -- and notorious for

employing both towards illicit ends. It is not only the presence of a razor that

links them to this story, but that it so happens that the lower ranks of the maltas

organized bands of capoeiras were once comprised of young adolescents

known at the time as caxingels.13 Not unlike present-day meninos de rua, the

majority of such kids were thought either to have been abandoned or to have run

away from their parents (Dias 2001: 105) although in this case they were just

as likely running away from their masters, given that so many of them were

slaves or the sons of slaves. In any case, they were employed by the maltasnot

only as apprentice-capoeiras, but also to carry the adults navalhas in the

streets, as they were less likely to be stopped and searched by the police. Still,

this did not keep police reports from referring to them as one of the principle

sources of disorder in the city, as well as criminals in the making (ibid). Here,

history truly seems to repeat itself in the present, in more than one way: the re-

found presence of such kids on the street; the fact that they are still

predominantly black (or at least not white); their not infrequent employment by

organized gangs; and their all-too-frequently being treated as a principle source

of violence and disorder in the city of Rio as opposed to a product of

embedded racial inequality and continuing practices of discrimination stemming

back to slavery, say, who, having little or nothing to lose and all-too-often no one

to trust in, opt for an attitude of generalized revolt? (see also Batista 2003; Head

2004; Szpacenkopf 2004).

13This term possibly derives from chitinjingele, a word of Angolan origins for a type of rat that

lives in palm-trees (L. Soares 1994: 93fn80).


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But let us return to the matter of the gesturerecalling the razors once so

closely associated with the art. Another researcher of capoeira has argued that

the historical memory of capoeira as played on the streets of Rio was practically

banished from the history of Brazilian capoeira, in that Bahian capoeira would

come to be considered more traditional (Reis 1997: 100). While a quick perusal

of the songs accompanying capoeira Angola as played in Rio would seem to

confirm this purported absence, the abiding presence of the throat-cutting

gesture subtly suggests otherwise. Although practitioners do not generally

comment publicly upon this cutting gesture, its enactment is far more than

merely an exception to this rule, as a trace of times past that just happened to

persist within the art form. Indeed, it is in large part its openly secretive nature

an act frequently performed, and yet not publicly discussed, and thereby

passing as if unnoticed that renders it so ripe with affect,even while resisting

reduction to any fixed signification.

To play off Foucaults politicized conception of the uses to which

knowledge is put, the gesture constitutes a form of embodied knowledge meant

not so much for understanding as for cutting(1977: 154) in this case, cutting

across any neat distinction between signification and sensation, such that history

may be actively felt in the present. Here, read through the historical images

assembled around the figure of the navalha, the gesture sensiblyreconnectsthe

art form to the socially marginal and culturally black/African Diasporic world

from which it was otherwise largely severed. In getting my throat playfully slit, my

own subjective experience as an adolescent was thus brought into direct

contact with objective past the object-ive past of the razor-blades former use

by capoeiras, in particular.14 And yet, although it thereby lends itself to being

read as an act of embodied historical memory and cultural resistance, that

connection at the same time risks being reduced to the clichd image of a

racialized propensity for violence.

Nonetheless, it is not just the visceral emergence of capoeiras violent

past through my simulated assassination that invests this experience with such

14Here, then, the past and present mutually impacted one-another without having its meaning

neatly contained through the clichd narrative of capoeiras past in the form of history-as-progress, even as capoeiras disorderly propensity for physical violence was itself (for-the-most-part) contained in the form of a rule-bound spectacle of force a spectacle to which that gestureresponds through its quiet enactment of what would be a far more effective form of violence.


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heightened and open-ended affect (see Massumi 2002: 35, 43). I would suggest

that the principle revelatory moment in the game narrated above lies not in the

firstgesture my mestremade, but rather in his repetitionof that gesture within the

same game, this time as a (mock) cure.

Here, it is not by chance that experienced practitioners of capoeira Angola

are referred to as mandingueiros what could be translated literally as

magicians, or more loosely but accurately as masters of sorcerous movement.

As M. Taussig has said with regard to the trickery at the heart of magical healing

rituals, the real skill of the practitioner lies not in skilled concealment, but in the

skilled revelation of skilled concealment (Taussig 1998: 222). In this case, the

gesture of healing playfully repeats what was already a simulation of an act of

violence in the realm of play, not so much inverting the violence of the gesture

as multiplying its ambivalence doubling over an already (at least) two-sided

gesture-turned-sign.

What does it mean for the violence of times past, so closely associated

with the razors the capoeiras once wielded, to be evoked within the art as played

in the present, only to be ludically transformed into the semblance of healing?

Actually, to attempt to isolate the meaning of these gestures would be to miss

out not only on what their inclusion in the game does to them, but also on what

the act of writingabout such gestures does, cutting them from one context and

inserting them into another: in both cases, if in different ways, it would be to miss

out on how these gestures are put into play. Here, then, it is not a matter of

findingmeaning hidden within either one, so much as actively reading meaning

and movement (back) into them as they are excised from the sensate context of

the game and spliced into this papers attempt to flesh out the falsity of

performance through the performance of falsidade in this art form.

Placed in the overall context of Brazilian culture, and treated as a

particularly significant emblem in the allegoricalwriting of ethnography (Clifford

1986), the placing of the band-aid might be taken as emblematic of the myth of

racial democracy a mere gesture of good will or the semblance of harmony

that largely shields racial antagonism from public acknowledgement without

allowing it to truly heal. Yet here, the poetic twist in the second gestures

meaning, in reenacting the violence of the first gesture even while softening it

through humor, lends it heightened affect and ambivalence. It thereby resonates


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with, and immeasurably amplifies, the mystery of the inside game of capoeira

(Angola) as a whole, through its improvised montage of violence and intimacy,

seriousness and humor, conflict and play.15 And in so doing, it may well call

attention to the unwritten underside of capoeiras own dark past the ludic

dimension of the art to which the fear of the capoeiras blades may well haveblinded those recording their presence in the past.

Innumerable times, I have heard comments by practitioners to the effect

that capoeira cannot be a fightunless it is also a dance; without the continual

interplay between these poles, capoeira as such would cease to be, for its

singular nature is constituted precisely through the dynamic tension between

them. Rather than take this as an ahistorical statement that fails to recognize the

changes capoeira has undergone with the passing of time, we might treat it along

the lines of what W. Benjamin termed a dialectical image an image at a

standstill that is nevertheless pregnant with historical import, whose multiple

meanings reverberate between past and present without coalescing into an

orderly historical account (Buck-Morss 1989).16 As suggested by this story of

getting my throat slit and then bandaged, the crux of the game lies not so much

in the continual tension between the agonistic and ludic dimensions of the art, or

in a neat synthesis of them both, as in the continually improvised transformations

of fight into dance and back again, never in quite the same way; and that

processual entanglement is no less true how the outside world is read (and

written) in terms of the inside game, or, in turn, how the past and present

mutually impact upon one another in ever-altering ways.

15Herein lies one of the principle values of a broadly narrative or poetic approach to both

studying and conveying the social, cultural, and historical significance of capoeira Angola:namely, it allows one to accentuate the singularities of particular games while at the same timecalling attention to the theatricality of the game as a whole. Attention to both the poetic

dimensions of this cultural practice and the ways in which it is narrated by practitioners makes itpossible to write about the movement enacted therein without immobilizingits meaning; such anapproach is thus particularly valuable with respect to teasing out the cultural resonances of theinherently fluid form of the inside game. In turn, through highlighting the improvisationaldimension of the traditional style of capoeira, this approach questions the tendency to equatetradition with stasis and the modern with change. Moreover, it foregrounds the capacity ofpractitioners to respond to unforeseen circumstances through the insights of the sensuouslyembodied past.16For other anthropological engagements with Walter Benjamins approach to historys impactsupon the present and/or the concept of dialectical image, see Dawsey 2005; Stewart 1996;Taussig 1993, 2004).


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Here, then, what does the cutting-gesture-turned-mocking-cure exemplify,

if not precisely the passage from the performance of falsidade to an affirmation of

the falsity of performance its emergent edge? Here, moreover, it is crucial to

recall the subtle yet indispensable role that discourse played both times he cut

me: first, when my mestre quietly exclaiming Danou!, thereby playing on the

double meaning of the word itself to displace the gesture from the realm of

dancing to that of killing/dying; and second, when he voiced the word, Band-

aid!, thereby effectively transforming that gesture into a jest. Here, the second

speech act most forcefully and creatively constituted an atypical expression a

cutting edge of deterritorialization causing language to tend toward the limit of

its elements...toward a ... beyond of language (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 99).

At the same time, it was by no means the voicing of the word alone that effected

the transformation of the gesture, for it would have been just plain meaningless

as opposed to stretching language to the limitsof meaning if not voiced in the

immediate context of that game of bodily movement and embodied dialogue

and, perhaps to a lesser extent, if not subsequently echoed in the song

accompanying the game. For the creatively falsifying edge of performance

does not emerge from an otherwise inert matter, but as a momentary

actualization of an already charged field of potential:

Its field of emergence is strewn with the after-effects of events past,

already-formed subjects and objects and the two-pronged systemsof capture (of content and expression, bodies and words) regulatingtheir interaction: nets aplenty. In order to potentialize a new type,the atypical expression must evade these already establishedarticulations... (Massumi 2002: xxix).

Rather than attempt to further explicate this rather heady piece of theory,

let me just conclude by suggesting that herein lies some useful clues as to the

role that the truth-seeking genre of ethnography has to play in both

comprehending and contributing towards the falsifying emergence of

performance: that of both creatively (re)constituting the fieldof contextual details

that potentialize such emergence, and critically clearing away the already

established articulations that constrain and counteract such potential in their

field of performance no less than in our field of discourse. Here, I would

suggest that if we are to get at the emergenceof performance, we would do well

to refigure the relation between our writing and that emergence in such a way as


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not to do away without their distinction, but to foldone over into the other even

while unfoldingtheir difference.

Accordingly, in each story, and the exegesis that follows it, I have

attempted to evoke the process of revelation through concealment enacted

through the falsidade of capoeira angola in ways sufficiently different, I hope,

not to be reduced to a neat model. I have sought to hint, in turn, at how this

process offers one possible figuration of how the emergent edge of performance

can be unfolded through a broadly performative mode of ethnographic writing,

and thereby folded into the anthropology of performance. But, lest it pass

unperceived, I should note that there is an element of provocation in such a

figuration, insofar as one takes it to imply that truthsare folded into the writing of

ethnography as signs of violenceare folded into the play of capoeira angola as

momentary revelations amidst the constancy of deceit.


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Batista, Vera Malaguti2003 O Medo na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro: Dois tempos de uma

histria. Rio de Janeiro: Revan.Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs

1990 Poetics and performance as Critical Perspecctives on Languageand Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology19: 59-88.

Briggs, Charles1988 Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in

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Press.Browning, Barbara1995 Samba: Resistance in Motion. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.Buck-Morss, Susan

1989 The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.Cambridge: MIT Press.

Clifford, James1986 On Ethnographic Allegory. In Writing Culture: The Politics and

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Clifford, James and George Marcus

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