Corporeidade na Capoeira Angola: formas de viver e pensar grafadas no corpo

Abstract

When we think about Brazilian social structure, particularly in the context of popular cultures, we cannot ignore the contributions of our ancestors—a people socially, administratively, and politically organized, with their own traditions, beliefs, principles, and values, who brought back to life, through bodily practices, the Africa that was taken from them. Based on this understanding, Capoeira Angola carries memories translated through the body that connect us to the principles of ancient African cosmology, especially of the Bakongo people, as I seek to demonstrate in this study. Rooted in Bantu principles and worldviews, Capoeira Angola is an ancestral space-time that keeps alive the corporeal memory of what once was and is reactivated in the 'roda'. Within this space-time, I reflected on the ancestral narratives of the Bakongo, using Mestre Pastinha's capoeira as a reference and starting from the analysis of the concept of 'body proper', where I find the necessary means for the description and interpretation of phenomena, as a researcher and practitioner of Capoeira Angola. In a qualitative and transdisciplinary approach, I used the concepts of corporeality, body proper, and orality, along with the fundamentals of Bakongo cosmology