Graceful Resistance: How Capoeiristas Use Their Art for Activism and Community Engagement is the second book by Lauren Miller Griffith, whose previous book, In Search of Legitimacy: How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition, also covers capoeira. Griffith is a performance anthropologist and associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Texas Tech University. According to Griffith, the book’s “biggest contribution is in showing how involvement in a leisure community, something often written about as spurious, can fundamentally alter one’s way of being in the world.…The individuals and groups I profile here have found resonance in the idea of capoeira as a model for civic engagement, and I am privileged enough to write about it as such without fear of serious backlash” (8).Graceful Resistance sets out to investigate just what elements of the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira make it attractive to and productive of socially engaged individuals. That is, whether there is a unique element to capoeira’s history and practice that attracts activist-leaning participants or if capoeira as an embodied practice produces a civic-minded approach.
Working with and expanding from Robert Stebbins’s concept of “serious leisure,” Griffith asks if there is something about capoeira that lends itself to social activism. Stebbins defines serious leisure as “a mixture of amateurism, hobbyist pursuits, and career volunteering which individuals pursue outside of work and within which they find personal satisfaction” (11). She moves toward and through this question in the book, at one point asking herself if she is merely seeing capoeira as a reflection of her own wishes for what it should be or perhaps if she’s just been influenced by the types of socially engaged capoeiristas she’s been privileged to practice with. Serious leisure, according to Stebbins, is contrasted with “unserious leisure” through its intentional activity as opposed to the passive engagement characteristic of unserious leisure. Stebbins’s theory posits that people engaged in serious leisure would “eventually shift from their primary identification away from work towards the forms of leisure they find fulfilling” (11). Supplementing this, Griffith’s introduction also cites Kjølsrød’s studies which extend Stebbins’s conception of serious leisure, arguing that a person’s involvement in serious leisure may lead them into more serious political engagement. Combined with the feminist communitarian framework of Karen Gallant, Susan Arai, and Bryan Smale, serious leisure may not only result in expanded political engagement, but also shift the dynamic between individuals and their community. It is from this foundation that Griffith sets out to evaluate capoeira as a relational, Afro-Brazilian martial art, one in which practitioners often leave more aware of and concerned with the dynamic societal structures around them.
Participation becomes the active arm of the performance here, the site at which these interactions might occur. And Griffith urges us to note that the idea of capoeira as serious leisure is not simply an outside anthropological conception, by highlighting the significance of the words used to describe capoeira activity. The element of brincando, the present active form of the verb brincar, describes participation in the games played by capoeiristas in the roda, the performance circle. Used in the way one might utilize sparring in other martial arts, brincar is equated with another Portuguese verb, jogar, both meaning “to play.” However, where jogar describes the type of play that occurs in sports, brincar “means to play in a carefree manner like children,” connoting “a joyous kind of play that doesn’t necessitate an objective” (26). Griffith goes on to identify and define words such as malíca and malandragem which serve to further illuminate the affective position taken by capoeiristas and familiarize the outsider with some of the various contours of this dynamic art.
A central element in the book’s discussion is that of race, and readers will find that many featured voices are preceded by descriptions identifying the race, ethnicity, and/or nationality of the interlocutor. While perhaps jarring to some readers, this choice serves a purpose in the argument of this text and is relevant to current discussions regarding the evolution and continued development of capoeira as a martial art and cultural expression, some of which involve concerns of authenticity, gentrification, afro-centrism, and nationalism, implicitly and explicitly engaging the social and societal dynamics of race in the martial art. More specifically, race becomes, at times, a contentious subject when discussing capoeira’s origins as a West Africa-derived art form “developed by enslaved Africans in Brazil” (8), an art form that was outlawed in Brazil with the Criminal Code of 1890, when slavery was abolished, until the mid-twentieth century for these very associations as an African-derived practice.
In its twentieth-century development, capoeira split into two main schools that became the three most common today—capoeira angola, capoeira regional, and capoeira contemporânea (an outgrowth of capoeira regional). Many current discussions place capoeira angola as the afro-centrist, activist form of capoeira in contrast to the supposedly gentrified regional or contemporânea forms of capoeira. Naming the identities and lineages of the practice of her interlocutors becomes invaluable to Griffith’s mission of troubling the stable notions of what capoeira is and is not, can and cannot be. Griffith notes that there are some capoeira practitioners who decide not to acknowledge the African roots of the art, but makes a point to call out the “symbolic violence” inherent in denying the Black beginnings of this art. In regard to a theoretical stance on the birth of capoeira, Griffith states that she finds “the creolization thesis most compelling” with its emphasis on the interplay of the African and Brazilian elements in its development (33).
The introduction sees Griffith clarify the blueprint for the book, walking the reader through her plan for each chapter and providing a general overview of her argument. In chapter 1, Griffith walks through a general history of capoeira and various theories for its genesis in addition to outlining some of the performance theories and concepts she will be working with throughout the text. Chapter 2 digs deeper into the history of the martial art and how this evolution and its various interpretations inform the discussion of capoeira as embodied resistance. In chapter 3, the concept of affective habitus is introduced, and it is here that Griffith dives into her theories on the performative affect of capoeira’s socially resistant aspects. Chapter 4 works further with the idea of affective habitus by foregrounding the everyday concerns and practices of her capoeirista interlocutors in their training—those practices and activities which occur outside of the roda, and bookend the class experience.
Chapter 5 focuses on the various socio-political orientations of the capoeira community—who is drawn to this martial art and why. Chapter 6 focuses on public displays of action in the various capoeira groups consulted for the study, while chapter 7 investigates how these various activist stances manifest in the private lives of capoeiristas. Chapter 8 attempts to address some of the “shortcomings” in the capoeira community, by looking at seemingly conflicting elements of some interpersonal dynamics that manifest in the capoeira community at large, such as sexism and misogyny in the classroom. Chapter 9, the final chapter, closes out the book by reviewing Griffith’s arguments and overarching question—what about capoeira lends itself to social activism?
Rather than engage in a surface-level discussion of what encompasses social activism, Griffith’s book attempts to reconsider capoeira and its relation to social activism and resistance from the inside. Throughout the book, Griffith makes a point to consistently think alongside her interlocutors and fellow capoeiristas, featuring their lived experiences, perspectives, and direct quotations throughout the text in a way that prioritizes them not only as practitioners but also as researchers in their own right. Further, Griffith does something masterful with the text, as participation is seen to feature multi-dimensionally. In addition to referring to the intentionality of activity, of the physical act of “joining in,” participation also serves to refer to social and civic participation of capoeiristas outside of the roda or “improvisational game” central to the martial art. Further, participation becomes the frame through which serious orientations to the form are considered to be beyond a mere physical act. Participation here is a mental and spiritual position as presence in relation to fellow capoeiristas, as well as to one’s willingness to approach engagement in the responsibilities of the everyday. What Griffith’s book comes to showcase is that capoeira, at its best, far from being a mere physically demanding sport, is a relational and dynamic spiritual practice.
Readers previously unfamiliar with capoeira will find that they can follow along easily with Griffith’s work as she backgrounds the history of the art form through its cultural, social, ethnic, national, and international histories, in addition to providing a glossary that defines key capoeira terms and supplies their translations, though Griffith also notes that her previous book, In Search of Legitimacy, is a more thorough history of the art. Further, even with its heavy engagement with the performance theories of anthropologists and cultural theorists such as Greg Downey, Victor Turner, Tami Spry, Jill Dolan, and Floyd Merrell, to name a few, Griffith’s language remains accessible, and her explanations of and interventions into these theories are stated in such a way as to make engagement pleasant to a broad audience, from the casual reader to the seasoned performance theorist.
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[Review length: 1548 words • Review posted on January 29, 2025]