Capoeira Was Not “Invented” — It Was Rewritten, Again and Again

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This article supplies the corpus's theoretical vocabulary: how to study the traditions of formerly colonised peoples without freezing them in the immutable — or making them pass for “fake”? The answer holds in one word: redefined, rather than invented. And in one concept destined for development: the traditions of innovation.

A concept that changed everything

What does a concept do to the objects it describes? The question deserves to be put to one of the most fertile concepts in the social sciences: Eric Hobsbawm's “invented tradition”.

Recall its force. Hobsbawm showed that many cultural objects claiming direct filiation with the past are in reality constructed out of contemporary stakes: “Invented traditions are opposed to authentic traditions not in that they are fabricated […] but in that their continuity with the past is only fictitious, and that they pursue objectives which are no longer traditional at all.” In this acceptation, capoeira is indeed an invented tradition: endowed with a centuries-old base, it was endlessly redefined to answer the demands of its time.

The concept irrigated the entire field: the founding studies of Pires, Soares, Reis and Vassallo on capoeira; Réunion's moring (Combeau-Mari); Breton gouren (Epron); the traditional sailing boats of the Antilles (Pruneau, Dumont); the Ivorian dances whose “modernity and creativity” Yaya Koné underlined against “the still-prevailing image of an immutability of African cultures”. The thesis goes so far as to see in it “a veritable revolution in Thomas Kuhn's sense”.

And it must be said, for it gives what follows its particular weight: the author of the thesis was himself of that school. His work on capoeira (2008), then on mayolè (2012), mobilised the paradigm of invention. The displacement that follows is not an adversary's charge. It is a practitioner's reckoning with his own concept.

The perverse effect of the word “invention”

Within the scientific field, the idea that everything is constructed shocks no one — even scientific facts are, as Latour and Woolgar showed. There, the word “invention” disqualifies nothing. Outside that field, matters stand otherwise. “It is unfortunately possible, by affixing the term invention to a cultural object, to weaken its importance or its reach. An invented or centuries-old cultural practice is a social reality resting on women and men invested in its preservation or development.”

And the effect is at its maximum precisely where the practices repair: “the study of the traditions embraced by dominated populations through the paradigm of invention can lead, indirectly, to a devaluation of these practices at the very moment they are helping to give back a cultural footing, a history and a pride to people who are still stigmatised or marginalised.” To say “invented” of gwoka, of mayolè or of capoeira is to risk being heard as saying “fake”.

The risk is not speculative. Avanza and Laferté showed that constructivist formulas “quickly make the identities, traditions and memories analysed by the researcher pass for 'false'” — their proponents having been “accused of extending the domination of whites and of undermining the cultural legitimacy of indigenous elites”. The vocabulary forged to emancipate the gaze can reinstate the very hierarchy it was meant to undo.

To redefine is not to invent

The displacement leans on Benedict Anderson, who had located the error: assimilating “invention” to “fabrication and falsity, rather than to imagining and creation”. For “there is no community but an imagined one. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” If every community is imagined, imagination no longer disqualifies anything. It is the very stuff of cultural life.

Whence the formula: “Capoeira is a centuries-old tradition of African origin, endlessly redefined — we prefer this term to that of invention — over the course of the twentieth century. The past was rethought, remodelled, even transformed, to answer contemporary demands.”

Measure what the substitution changes. “Invented” suggests fabrication, fiction, a masked rupture. “Redefined” recognises three things at once: a real continuity with the African inheritance — something is transmitted, which is redefined; the agency of the actors — each redefinition answers rationally to precise historical conditions; and creativity as a form of fidelity — “the multiple redefinitions of capoeira express the inventiveness, the creativity of the actors”. History supplies the proof by example: Burlamaqui's codification of 1928 — modern through and through, and faithful at its centre.

Neither celebration nor suspicion

The displacement licenses no critical slackening. The double requirement remains: “not to renounce unveiling certain mechanisms of reconstruction or rewriting of history” — and “to avoid sinking into the opposite excess, of simplifying reality by thinking cultural objects only in the light of their rupture with the past”. Neither naive celebration of the immutable. Nor systematic suspicion of fabrication.

This third way will receive, in the BCAI's later work, a name: the traditions of innovation. Permanent innovation not as the betrayal of tradition — as its highest form.

SOURCES

Hobsbawm, E. & Ranger, T. (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Fr. ed. Amsterdam, 2012). — Babadzan, A., Journal de la Société des océanistes, 109, 1999. — Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (Fr. ed. La Découverte, 2014). — Latour, B. & Woolgar, S., Laboratory Life (Fr. ed. La Découverte, 1996). — Avanza, M. & Laferté, G., “Dépasser la 'construction des identités' ?”, Genèses, 61, 2005. — Combeau-Mari, É. & Ratsimbazafy, E. (2006); Epron, A. & Robène, L. (2006); Pruneau, J., Dumont, J., Célimène, N., Ethnologie française, 2006; Koné, Y., Staps, 101, 2013. — Malo, O., Master STAPS 2008 and Master's in History 2012, Université des Antilles. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, General Introduction.

IN THE CORPUS

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HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Capoeira Was Not “Invented” — It Was Rewritten, Again and Again. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 10. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/capoeira-was-not-invented-it-was-rewritten-again-and-again. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.