The Circle or the Ring: A 1928 Rulebook’s Hidden Choice

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Can everything in a practice be modernised without betraying what founds it? The Burlamaqui case answers with facts — and supplies the historical proof of the concept that governs the corpus: the faithful redefinition. It also rectifies a date in the literature: 1940, not 1968, for the first official ruleset adopting the ring.

“It has neither rule nor method”

In 1928 there appears in Rio a book whose title is a programme: Gymnastica nacional (capoeiragem) methodisada e regrada. Its author, Annibal Burlamaqui, known as Zuma, is moved by a nationalist conviction: “Ah, how beautiful it would be if all true Brazilians took the initiative of learning it, studying the smallest secrets this purely Brazilian game possesses.”

His diagnosis holds in one word: the absence of organisation. Despite twenty years of movement in favour of the national fighting art, it counts for nothing against English boxing and football. “Capoeiragem, as everyone knows, is many years old; however, it has neither rule nor method. Those who have the fortune of knowing it did not think, until now, of methodising it, of giving it rules […] I, therefore, Brazilian that I am, loving what belongs to me, have devised a rule to present it, and to make of it a sport.”

To codify in order to exist. The practice's survival passes through its setting into rules. Provided the setting into rules did not betray what it codified. Now everything about Burlamaqui makes him an heir rather than an inventor — and the proofs are textual. Part of his book is identical to the statements of Lothus and Aleixo published in the press in 1916. He copied out the entire O.D.C. manual within the walls of the National Library. And interviewed as early as 1925, he detailed under cover of anonymity the techniques of the old capoeiras — rasteira, rabo de arraia, tranco, pentear, chincha — names and descriptions taken up in the 1928 book. “The technical nomenclature was sometimes different, but the gestures were the same.” His codification does not invent. It transmits.

A modernity without remainder — almost

Read the rules of 1928: they tick every box of modern sporting rationalisation. A delimited, measured space. A perfect equality at the start. A judge “recognised as competent and impartial”. A regulation time, at the end of which the man who has fallen most is declared the loser — a criterion that consecrates, once again, the centrality of imbalance in the game. Down to the choice of ground, carefully motivated: “preferably a football pitch […] because the grass cushions the falls and holds no dust.” Pragmatism, safety, hygiene.

Nothing, in appearance, distinguishes this codified capoeiragem from the other modern sports. Nothing — except one element.

The shape of the space

Burlamaqui keeps the circle. And the reason for the choice touches the foundation: “African fights and dances were practised inside a round: a space closed upon itself, produced by and destined for the community. Burlamaqui, to be sure, opened this space to spectators — but he maintained the initial geometric form.” In the most complete modernisation capoeiragem had ever known, a single element escapes the overhaul. And it is precisely the one that carries the inheritance.

That the choice was not self-evident, the sequel proves. The project of the Brazilian Pugilism Federation adopted a boxing ring — as early as 1940, which constitutes a rectification brought by the thesis: the first ruleset decided by an official sporting body dates from 1940, and not from 1968 as the literature has it. The quarrel flared again at the Rio symposia of 1968–1969, where the question sharply opposed the Carioca teachers — favourable to the ring — and their Bahian counterparts. The circle and the ring were, for decades, the two terms of a disputed choice.

And the choice commits more than a preference of layout. The ring — quadrilateral, ropes, corners — is the space of the modern Western duel: it isolates the fighters from the world and delivers them to the pure face-to-face. The circle is the space of the African rounds — the batuque described by Lothus, the future roda, the Guadeloupean lawonn: it envelops the duel in the community that watches it, gives it rhythm, and guarantees it. To choose the shape of the space was to choose which civilisation of combat sporting capoeiragem would inherit from.

The faithful redefinition

By maintaining the circle at the very heart of his modernisation, Burlamaqui accomplished, without theorising it, what the thesis calls a faithful redefinition: innovate in the rules, preserve the deep structure. His gesture of 1928 is the proof by geometry that one can change everything in a practice — its rules, its judge, its ground, its time — without betraying anything of what founds it.

It is the historical verification of the theoretical displacement that governs the corpus: traditions do not survive despite their redefinitions. They survive by them.

SOURCES

Collections of the National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro): Burlamaqui, A., Gymnastica nacional (capoeiragem) methodisada e regrada, Rio de Janeiro, 1928; Falção, I., “Esplendôr e decadencia da capoeiragem”, Careta, 14 Nov. 1925; Lothus, R. and Aleixo, M., Carioca press, 1916. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part I, ch. D.1–D.3.

IN THE CORPUS

→ Capoeira Had Teachers and Textbooks Long Before Its Official “Rebirth”

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

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Circle or the Ring: A 1928 Rulebook’s Hidden Choice. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 12. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-circle-or-the-ring-a-1928-rulebooks-hidden-choice. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.