Do You Know Capoeira?: Introduction

When Edison Carneiro, an African-Brazilian intellectual, asked the American anthropologist Ruth Landes ‘Do you know capoeira?’ in 1938 he expected her to say she did not. It was then a minority pastime even in Brazil. While today capoeira is better known all over the world, it is still common to meet people who have never heard of it. Thirty years after Landes’s fieldwork, the novelist Jorge Amado, who did not expect readers of his book about Salvador to know capoeira either, introduces it using one of its songs.