A missão: uma etnografia da capoeira como instrumento de cooperação internacional brasileira na África lusófona

Abstract

This article seeks to problematize, by means of an ethnographic survey, the limits of a Brazilian international cooperation mission conducted in Guinea Bissau, in which capoeira emerges as an instrument of diplomatic action within the context of South-South cooperation. This ethnographic survey focuses on the validation mission for the project entitled Capoeira and educational training for citizenship in Guinea-Bissau, in which various Brazilian institutional players and their Guinean partners participated, under the aegis of the "return of an African cultural practice to its origins”. The article intends to reflect on the meanings attributed to the mission, in order to understand the process of capoeira's belated internationalization on the African continent, the fact that it took place under the tutelage of the Brazilian state in the context of the Bolsonarist government, in which cooperation with the global south was weakened, but also in which one of the forms of political negationism concerning the importance of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in the Brazilian context is being intensely experienced. Finally, and based on the African model, it attempts to pose hypotheses, clues and questions about the coming processes of internationalization of capoeira.