Capoeira -

what I was or what were we? What have they done to us? What could we become again?

Abstract

We have records of the existence of the practice of capoeira in Brazil since the 19th century. A cultural and philosophical expression of African matrix that resisted the European colonization intertwined with the historical and social processes that were part of the life of Africans in Brazil. Thinking capoeira as a territory of respect for differences and otherness, this article seeks to understand how capoeira groups were influenced by the individualistic and excluding logic of the capitalist system, and to analyze the effects of this influence on the ethics of group organization from the analysis of recent cases of abuse of a moral and sexual nature practiced by mestres from one of the largest capoeira groups today. It also seeks to project other epistemological possibilities based on African perspectivism and the pluriversality of its philosophies, so that we can think about what we could become again. The article concludes that there is a distancing of capoeira practitioners from the epistemologies that structured this Afro-Brazilian cultural expression and that, added to this, the influence of the capitalist system has been degenerating human relations within large capoeira groups.