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?
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Here, 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 representative of his overall approach.

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-soelegant solution on the part of an interpretive anthropology: namely, I approach the affirmation of falsity in performance through the performance of falsidade in 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

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, viewing anthropology through the lens of falsidade, thereby recasting the disciplines pursuit of Truth, or will-to-knowledge, as but the normalizing counterpart to the violently objectifying thrust of a discourse of power. Yet this would be to rely on an otherwise similar model of truth as an underlying 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

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 oral narratives in textual form, and the importance of literary as opposed to literal translations in evoking the non-verbal components of oral performance. 4 To 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; Tavares 1984; Vieira 1995. For more strictly historical accounts of capoeira, see, in particular, Assuno 2005; Dias 2001; Soares 1994, 2004. 5 Thus, 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, in which 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 the aftermath of slavery leading up to the present, in which the structural effects of racial discrimination persist even as its forms mutate, such that even the sometimes truly held belief in racial democracy comes to serve as yet another masking of racial inequality. Capoeiras inner aesthetics of deception has also been related more directly and pragmatically to contemporary times: here, learning to deal with the propensity for deception within the game of capoeira helps its practitioners avoid, see through, and/or manipulate the much more dangerous propensity for deception in the real world; and, from a less individual-centered and more group-centered perspective, that aesthetic has been read as an embodied expression of an Afro-Brazilian, and/or African Diasporic, identity-in-the-making, which relies at least as much on indirect forms of cultural resistance as it does on direct forms of social and political confrontation.

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
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The 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 this inner/outer distinction: even when not taking the form of an inner realm of subjective experience and ultimately uncontaminated by the outer realm of deceiving appearances and the continual play of power, or the inverse form of belief in a class-based and need-based consciousness rising up to sweep away the illusions of bourgeois subjectivity, how, one skeptic asks, can one not believe in a powerful concerted organization, a great and powerful plot, which has found the way to make clichs circulate, from outside to inside, from inside to outside? (Deleuze 1989: 209).

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
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Bauman 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 social interaction in which it occurs. Focusing on verbal performances in particular, they argue that far from 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 otherwise abstract context are particularly relevant with regard to the performance at hand; and in so doing, they play an active role in both constructing and transforming that very context. I would take their argument a step further, in two related directions. First, I would emphasize that performance emerges not quite through or alongside its contextualization, as they imply, but always just in advance thereof: here, the process of contextualization would itself involve a retrospective analysis a backtracking toward the conditions which gave way to the performance 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 nonverbal, embodied performances, I would emphasize the greater degree of ambuiguity involved in singling out relevant contextualization cues, and hence the more performative nature of the interpretations thereof. Here, then, I seek not only to foreground the unpredictable, creative dimension of performance itself, but also to suggest that analysis itself must give way to fabulation it must itself engage with the falsity of performance if it is to allow for the actual emergence of performance to be glimpsed. For an extended and quite lively discussion of emergence, not only with respect to performance theory and bodily movement, but also scientific discourse and invention, see B. Massumi 2002.

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 6

meet them. Conversely, if you flip over such a magazine to its back cover, the other face 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 razorwielding 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 7

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 8

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-andresponse 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 9

look of a policeman, the distracted look of a prostitute, the hallucinated look of a so-called menino de rua out 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 imageclichs 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-asprogress offered in the typical capoeira magazine with the rupturing of the more specifically ethnographic fiction 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 the jogo 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 the jogo 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 experiential quality 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 in performance which demands attention at this point in the development of bodily discourses indeed, we must begin not only to 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).
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The 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 surprising that Crapanzano compares ethnographers to one such trickster-god: "The ethnographer is a little like Hermes: a messenger who, given methodologies for uncovering the masked, the latent, the unconscious, 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-turnednarrators 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 a fortress 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 , Grande com seu jogo grande , de grande movimentos. e Joo

Nem eu nem

Armandinho que 'tava sentado ao meu lado vimos alguma maldade acontecer dentro 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 tomou o 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 eye that 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 look plays in the 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 13

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 quasi devassar a inteno ainda occulta, o desejo, apenas, pensado, voltada sempre para o adversario apanhando-lhe todos os movimentos, 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 os recuos saltados de corpo, leve, sobre ponta de ps, at facultar e perceber 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 subsequent descriptions 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

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 author laments the fact that practitioners of his time no longer take their amor a arte, or love for the art to the extremes they once did. This inserts a note of ambivalence into his words, suggesting that they are less a description of an aspect of the game as immediately present to him than a poetic evocation of the art as already passing into the past and resurrected through the powers of his penned 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 suffusing it, 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 why he was telling the story or exactly what he meant by it or what had really happened. 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.
10

While 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 of the witchdoctor, who does not only divine with is lips, but with his whole body. He dances the 10 questions that are put to him (in Taussig 1998: 249); whereas here, the dance of deception is deployed to sidestep the questions posed in the ensuing dialogue.

15

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 rhythmically danced 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, invoked a 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-toovisible 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
11

What 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 this aesthetic tension in the body of the performer: she establishes the metronomic grid of the story as she simultaneously depicts its actions. And the writer of story finds literary equivalents of these oral 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 quickpaced percussive rhythm which also happens to be referred to by the term jogo 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.

12

J. 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 which J. Hastrup neatly summarizes as occluding the difference between the coevalness of fieldwork and the allochronism of writing (Hastrup 1990: 51). Still, as Hastrup goes on to argue, when we set aside the pretense of accurately mapping one space into the other (ibid), and actively assume ethnographic representation a a creative process of reenactment or evocation (Tyler 1986), then that very voice becomes one possible means by which ones former presence in the 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 capoeira ruffians 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 roda as 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 18

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, faca fina 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 gringo added to the sharpness of 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 socalled meninos de rua came 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 19

cane or umbrella, in what seemed like a scene taken straight from an afterschool 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 really close. 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 maltas not 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 refound 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).
13

This 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 gesture recalling 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 sensibly reconnects the 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
14

Here, 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-asprogress, even as capoeiras disorderly propensity for physical violence was itself (for-the-mostpart) contained in the form of a rule-bound spectacle of force a spectacle to which that gesture responds through its quiet enactment of what would be a far more effective form of violence.

21

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 first gesture my mestre made, but rather in his repetition of 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 writing about 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 finding meaning 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 allegorical writing 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 22

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 have blinded those recording their presence in the past. Innumerable times, I have heard comments by practitioners to the effect that capoeira cannot be a fight unless 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.

15

Herein 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 time calling 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 it possible to write about the movement enacted therein without immobilizing its meaning; such an approach is thus particularly valuable with respect to teasing out the cultural resonances of the inherently fluid form of the inside game. In turn, through highlighting the improvisational dimension of the traditional style of capoeira, this approach questions the tendency to equate tradition with stasis and the modern with change. Moreover, it foregrounds the capacity of practitioners to respond to unforeseen circumstances through the insights of the sensuously embodied past. 16 For other anthropological engagements with Walter Benjamins approach to historys impacts upon the present and/or the concept of dialectical image, see Dawsey 2005; Stewart 1996; Taussig 1993, 2004).

23

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, Bandaid!, 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 limits of 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 systems of capture (of content and expression, bodies and words) regulating their interaction: nets aplenty. In order to potentialize a new type, the atypical expression must evade these already established articulations... (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 field of 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 emergence of 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 fold one over into the other even while unfolding their 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 truths are folded into the writing of ethnography as signs of violence are folded into the play of capoeira angola as momentary revelations amidst the constancy of deceit.

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Dias, Luiz Srgio 2001 Quem Tem Medo da Capoeira? Rio de Janeiro, 1890-1904. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Geral. Downey, Greg 2005 Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fabian, Johannes 1983 Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: University of Columbia Press. Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. 1983 Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Gilpin, Heidi 1996 Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move? Tracing displacement and disappearance for movement performance. In Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power, Susan Leigh Foster, ed, pp. 106-128. New York and London: Routledge. Goffman, Erving 1985 A representao do eu na vida cotidiana. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes. Hanks, William 1989 Text and Textuality. Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 95-127. Head, Scott 2004 Danced Fight, Divided City: Figuring the Space Between. Phd dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. L.C. 1906 A Capoeira. Revista Kosmos, III. Rio de Janeiro. Langdon, Jean 1999 A fixao da narrativa: do mito para a potica de literatura oral Horizontes Antropolgicos Porto Alegre, ano 5, n. 12, pp. 13-36. Lewis, Lowell 1992 Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Massumi, Brian 2002 Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Reis, Letcia Vidor Sousa 1997 O mundo de pernas para o ar: A Capoeira no Brasil. So Paulo: Publisher Brasil. Ricoeur, Paul 1979 The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text. In Interpretive Social Science, A Reader, eds. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schechner, Richard 1993 The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. New York: Routledge. 1994 Ritual and Performance. In Companiona Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Ingold, Tim, ed. London: Routledge, pp. 613-647. 2002 Performance Studies in/for the 21st Century. Anthropology and Humanism 26(2): 158-166.

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Scheub, Harold 1998 Story. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Silverman, Kaja 1996 The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge. Szpacenkopf, Maria Izabel Oliveira 2004 Violncia: a quebra do reconecimento entre estado e cidado e o efeito de duplo. Formas de subjetivao. Carlos Augusto Peixoto Junior (org). Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa Livraria. Stewart, Kathleen 1996 A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an Other America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Taussig, Michael 1993 Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. 1998 Viscerality, Faith, and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century, ed. Nicholas Dirks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2004 My Cocaine Museum. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tavares, Jlio Csar de Souza 1984 Dana da guerra: arquivo-arma. Masters Thesis, Sociology Department. Braslia: UnB. Turner, Victor 1974 Drama, fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell Univeristy Press. 1982 From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Tyler, Stephen 1986 Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document. In Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, eds. Clifford James and George Marcus, pp. 122-40. Berkeley: University of California Press. Soares, Carlos Eugnio Lbano 1994 A negregada instituio: os capoeiras no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Coleo Biblioteca Carioca. 2002 A capoeira escrava e outras tradies rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850). So Paulo: Editora UNICAMP. Vieira, Luiz Renato 1995 O jogo da capoeira: corpo e cultura popular no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: SPRINT.

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