How to Save a Dying Art Without Killing What Keeps It Alive

WHY THIS ARTICLE

This article shows how a thesis becomes an institution: a balance sheet of gains, a philosophical elevation, an operative programme — and assumed limits, down to the critique of its own archives. That last operation is not a weakness: it is a criterion of scientificity.

What the inquiry established

What does a thesis conclusion do when it does not conclude? The 2020 conclusion performs three operations. The first is the balance sheet, holding the whole arc of the inquiry. At the end of the nineteenth century, the criminalisation of capoeiragem “had as a contingent effect its appropriation by the elites, the people and the pedagogues under its playful form.” The practice left the ill-famed alleys, became spectacle and competitive struggle in the theatres — “two championships were organised in 1905 and 1913, proofs of the vitality of this public capoeiragem.” The theatre of this history was Rio, “the political, intellectual and cultural epicentre of the country where the whole world met: Africans, Europeans and Asians” — where Black Brazilians, through their combat expertise, could transcend their social condition “and enter squarely into a positivist Brazilian society.”

What the duels give us to think

The second operation raises this balance sheet to the philosophical plane. Here the conclusion ceases to be a summary and becomes a thought. The Black combat arts carry “a complexity rarely seen in the field of martial arts and combat sports. In the kaleidoscopic duels, everything and its opposite coexist within one and the same regulatory and spatio-temporal frame: to touch and not to touch, to take flight and to fall. They have different meanings but a common value. They are the expression of that interweaving of African cultures with European and Asian cultures.”

Then comes the question that carries the whole conclusion — and the answer that must be quoted in full, for these are perhaps the most profound lines of the thesis: “How to understand the paradoxical game principles based on an inequality of departure and the voluntary reinforcement of the risk of losing? One must no doubt see in them the story of the strong against the weak. They translate the acceptance of a highly unbalanced power relation, its accentuation, and its surpassing through play, through fantasy. Facing death, to live by accepting one’s fate and at the same time refusing it at the last moment. The risk of losing is neither occulted nor even fled: it is accepted and magnified. The Black combat arts lead us to think a multidimensional world, made of contradictions and apparent paradoxes that intertwine to give life back to the complexity of existence. To play with fate in order to free oneself from it.”

The technical properties of the game — the assumed inequality, the voluntarily heightened risk — reveal themselves to be the playful transposition of a historical condition: that of men and women who, facing a hopeless balance of force, made of imbalance itself the matter of their art. To accept fate. And to refuse it at the last moment.

The programme

The third operation is the programme — and it is born of a diagnosis of urgency: “These complex or paradoxical duels, by that very complexity, have disappeared (the Cuban maní) or are on the verge of dying like the Guadeloupean mayolè and bènaden.” The sentence contains an explanation: it is the complexity of these games — their paradoxical richness, hard to transmit and to institutionalise — that makes them mortal. Simple practices standardise and survive. The kaleidoscopic duels die of what makes their value.

Hence the programme: “The moment has perhaps come to inscribe these Black combat arts in a double process of redefinition of their finalities and techniques and of preservation of their deep and extra-ordinary ludomotor structure. To patrimonialise with lucidity and intelligence, so that, even in a distant future, the ethnographic study may always be substituted for history…” Each term leans on a gain of the inquiry. Redefine and preserve: the lesson of Burlamaqui — faithful redefinition. Patrimonialise with lucidity: knowing the traps documented one by one — the folklorisation that freezes, the erasure of competing versions, the spectacle without structure.

A thesis that critiques its own archives

There remains the last operation, the most revealing: the assumed limits, “so many avenues for later research.” The carioca focus, “against research centred on Bahia” — but does this inversion allow one to surpass a regional history? The question stays open. The press archives themselves, despite their profusion: “these sources reflect reality only partially. Cultural vitality, within the lowest social strata, receives no particular attention. […] What of the capoeira practised in the favelas, among people of the same social condition whose finalities are neither political nor economic? We know nothing, or next to nothing, of it.” And the grouping of practices under the heading of Black combat arts, which “remains to be consolidated, practice by practice, terrain by terrain.”

Measure the symmetry: the thesis applies to its own sources the critique it opposed to the police sources of the historiography. The press too has its blind spots — and saying so is part of the demonstration. An approach that exposed only the bias of the adverse archives would be a polemic. One that exposes both is a science.

Historicise living practices. Document the internal logics before extinction. Consolidate the comparative category. Patrimonialise without betraying. This programme is the roadmap of the Black Combat Arts Institute — its first urgency being the Guadeloupean worksite of mayolè. The thesis did not conclude. It transformed itself into an institution.

SOURCES

Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): critical assessment of the press archives mobilised (1884–1955). — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, General Conclusion.

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Enslaved Duelled by Rules — in a System That Had None

→ Capoeira Is Not Alone in the World

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. How to Save a Dying Art Without Killing What Keeps It Alive. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 22. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/how-to-save-a-dying-art-without-killing-what-keeps-it-alive. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.