ABSTRACT
Edison Carneiro was telling Landes that in Rio someone was teaching capoeira in gyms, rather than it being learned in the streets as it had been for years, and that in Salvador the authorities had banned the dangerous and violent moves. He could not have known at the time, but these changes were the start of major changes to capoeira. This chapter focuses on movements in capoeira, both movements of the body and movements of the global phenomenon, using Urry’s (2007) conceptualisation of mobilities as method and theory which he argued was essential for sociology if it were to be meaningful in a mobile world. We address the polyvalent or polysemic nature of capoeira movements and the essential mobility of capoeira researchers, and set the stage for the discussion of globalisation that follows in Chapter 9. Of course these issues are equally relevant in many other dance forms (Wulff, 1998; Savigliano, 1995; Miller, 2014) and martial arts such as aikido.
