saintadatha

a selection of assorted quotations from my research,
proferred for your delectation
and blah.

I want to see Brazil as a drama where the beginning reappears at the end and where - in the dialectic of indecision, reflex, and paradox - the bandit can perfectly well take his place in the parlor even as the hero (a handsome, mustachioed owner of a coffee plantation, already thinking of establishing an industry) can lose his voice and move from being an anarchist and futurist cannibal to being a beach-blanket revolutionary like most people. (Matta 1991: 1)

The ascetism of inner body discipline is no longer incompatible with outer body hedonism, but has become a means towards it (Csordas 1994: 2).

by what right do we represent the ethnographic other, what are the consequences of doing so, what are the best alternative modes or representation? (Csordas 1994: 10)

In Salvador and Rio de Janeiro there is a simplified variant of capoeira, known variously as pernada, batuque, batuque-boi and banda. In Recife there is a modified, more individualistic, form of capoeira called passo, from which developed frevo, a frenetic, improvisatory and often comical dance in which the participants carry open umbrellas. Besides the Trinidad calenda, analogues of capoeira elsewhere in the New World include the Martinique martial art called ladjia in the south of the island, damie [acute e] in the north; its sister martial art in Guadeloupe, called chatou; the Cuban martial art known as mani [acute i] or Bambosa [acute second a], which may have died out; a martial art known as knocking and kicking, reported from the Sea Islands off Georgia and South Carolina; and broma, a martial art practised by black men in Venezuela. (Fryer 2000: 29)

When Pedro Alvares Cabal made the first official landing in Brazil in 1500, Portugal already had a tradition of African slavery extending back to the medieval times and had been engaged in commercial slave trade for almost sixty years. (Lewis 1992: 21)

When the native population of Brazil proved inadequate for the labour needs of the new colony, the Portuguese did not hesitate to begin transporting Africans there as well. So successful was the venture that it quickly grew into one of the largest enforced migration in human history, carrying a total of approximately three and one-half million people to Brazil alone in the course of 350 years (Curtin 1969: 49) If one adds the mortality rate on slave ships, which probably averaged ten to thirty percent, then the enormity of the disruption caused to African societies by this trade can be imagined (cf. Vansina 1966; Birmingham 1966). (Lewis 1992:21)

By 1835, 27,500 slaves resided in Salvador, constituting 42 percent of the citys population of 65,500 ... [and] white inhabitants of Salvador composed a minority (28.8 percent) of the citys inhabitants. (Graden 1996: 253-4)

Here, then, we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ordinary or real life. It is rather a stepping out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own. (Huizinga 1949: 8)

A malandro is someone who engages in malandragem, which can signify almost any kind of shady activity, and which in some contexts can also be a synonym for the practice of capoeira... Often such a person will be perceived as someone with time on their hands, as a vagrant, a vagabond. Accordingly, another potential synonym for the practice of capoeira is vadiacao, from vadiar, to be idle, to loaf, to bum around. (Lewis 1992: 47)

Another synonym for a capoeirista is mandinguero, which originates from a name for the African group(s) generally called the Mande [acute e] or Mandinka people. In Brazil these people had a reputation for knowledge of herbal healing and related magic, as they also did in Africa ... Eventually the term mandinguero became synonymous with anyone of African origin who had esoteric knowledge related to healing, especially the making of protective fetished to ward of evil influences, regardless of ethnic identification. (Lewis 1992: 49)

Some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary, they do not move; they stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people. (Gilles Deleuze 1985:149, in Osthoff 2000: 1)

Deleuzes definition of the nomad, as one who constantly reframes and subverts cultural paradigms, can be a useful model for examining the circulation of ideas among vastly different cultures. (Osthoff 2000: 1)

etc. etc.

love, hugs, dry humping, sweat, blood, and tears, and all sorts between.

how's the heat?!

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