5.1. Song and Ting: Two Examples from Taijiquan
Papineau [
2] begins his text with three chapters devoted to metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. To begin, he considers the state of mind that elite athletes need to uphold within competition. Papineau contrasts two main schools of thought: the “yoga” view, in which one should not think at all during action, allowing the body to do the work, and the other view, in which athletes need to be thinking about what they are doing and what to do next. The author proposes a more balanced perspective that blends unconscious reflexive action with calculations for strategy. This is a sound strategy for athletes with decades of experience in their game (such as the Wimbledon champions Papineau features in his chapter one), although it might be different in the case of learning Taijiquan. Papineau [
2] also focuses on athletes’ need to read cues in the body, indicating their deep, often semi-conscious awareness of specific tell-tale actions from an opponent. In this section, we will contrast some of these philosophical proposals with the case of a Taijiquan class, which has a deep focus on the relationship between body and mind, the lowering of stress (and feelings of anxiety) and the control of one’s thoughts.
Many Taijiquan classes use the language of the host culture in which they are practised, and this extends to the names of many of the techniques. For example, English terms such as “repulse monkey” and “diagonal flying” are used in place of the original Chinese terms. However, specific terms with deep philosophical meanings are retained in Mandarin, such as “step out into Wuji”, which corresponds to Daoist spiritual ideas around the emptiness and nothing needed to create an action [
42]. In this section, we examine the two interconnected core principles of Taijiquan expressed in the Chinese language, song and ting, which have connotations of relaxation and focus that Papineau [
2] delves into in the opening of his text (in Chapters one and two). Regardless of the style of Taijiquan, song and ting are two core concepts that bind the different schools of thought. It is as David once commented in class, “you have to find an authentic linage, and whatever that is, it’s the principles”. Song and ting are built into the Taijquan practitioner from the commencing of a class, with its stretching exercises and specific conditioning exercises, to its final closing-down exercises that involve the hands moving slowly downwards in front of the body to the flow, repeated several times, finishing with a physical stretch above one’s head. Over the last five years, George has witnessed the teacher David using many analogies to help the Western students understand the principles and eventually transform their body–mind relationship through the systematic release of tension (song) and finding the right balance of focus (ting). An early fieldnote showed some commands in 2018 to ”let the flesh drop”:
The class continued with this theme, with special slow exercises in which we were asked to “think of your skin is hanging down” and “as you move your hands up, think of the ground”. David reminded us: “The skeleton is up and the tissues are down”.
Over the years, David has moved on from his key mantra: “hang the flesh off the bones” to consider other structural analogies to help students picture what should be going on with their bodies and minds. Recently, inspired by the COVID-19 lockdown classes on Zoom, where one student, Nick showed the class his garden, David has used the idea of a hammock “as a good metaphor for Taiji”, with the structure of basic Taijiquan postures being a hammock that one can relax in through the skill of song. He has also used the notion of a trampoline, another popular garden contraption with parents of young children, such as Nick: “You’ve got to build the spring in the trampoline. You are the trampoline”. To enable the building of this springy, explosive Taijiquan body, the crown point (top of the head) is elevated by raising up from the occipital bone at the back of the skull. This action then sets the stretch in the spine, as students are told to “consolidate the back” (maintain this stretch) and “find the floor” (relax the body from the top down, until one feels the connection with the ground through the soles of the feet). Over time, it is common to hear a cracking sound in specific parts of the spinal column as the vertebrae open up, as George found one evening:
I felt and heard cracks among the lumps in my spine; clicks moved from the lumbar region to just below the neck (Fieldnotes).
Such movements are seen as internal ones that are hard to view from the outside perspective, unlike some of the principles in Capoeira covered later. The exercises are meant to open up the body and release tension in specific pockets which have built up over many years of sedentary living, work-related stress, trauma, sporting endeavours and manual labour. This tension is often deep within the body and mind and hard to detect, even in oneself. They are often invisible issues only detected after sustained training. Because of this abstract and often silent and invisible nature of the principles of song and ting, a series of analogies must be used, often using popular cultural reference points and mechanical ideas. These contemporary comparisons are also inspired by engineering, as David once reflected on a documentary on the famous Victorian achievement of the Clifton Suspension Bridge (designed by the renowned Isambard Kingdom Brunel in nearby Bristol) that captured the ting (attention) needed to hold one’s body up while relaxing all the soft tissues towards the floor (song). Below is another comparison to quicksand and treacle, which many British people would have enjoyed with their morning porridge as children:
”Imagine you’re in one of those old movies. Pull yourself out of the quicksand. David has given us this image last week, mentioning the classic Tarzan movies. I had watched these as a kid, and understood the image instantly. Today’s analogy was a spoonful of treacle: “Imagine a spoonful of treacle. The bones are the spoon. The flesh is the treacle. The treacle is really heavy and drops slowly […].
It’s a spoonful of treacle. The treacle takes its time to drop. Or something thicker—like a spoonful of molasses”. He said, glancing at me while creating another analogy.
Although David has a repertoire of regular analogies, he sometimes has to adjust the analogies he employs, depending on the demographic of his students. Nevertheless, many of the Taijiquan students are above the age of 45, and they come from backgrounds in yoga, qigong and martial arts, with the martial artists often retiring from Aikido, Cheng Hsin and Kung Fu due to the search for a system that is “more holistic” (in one classmate, Aidan’s, words) or “something deeper” (for David). These students are not normally so interested in the martial applications of the art, but the health benefits and longevity of movement that is enabled by Taijiquan. David reflected that: “It’s a peacetime art. We aim to develop over many years. It would be different if we were at war. We’d train for five or six years to go to battle. But knowing that, we’d have trouble with our bodies because of that training”. The martial aspects of this school of Taijiquan are more concerned with one’s own conditioning, than learning of a rehearsed response to a variety of attacks; as David once joked as we students gathered round in a circle: “It’s not about him [demonstration partner], it’s about me. It’s self-centric in that way”.
Some devoted students travel for 60 to 90 min from other regions to learn from this particular lineage, with one student, Eleanore, originally from the USA, having visited many other classes in the region and regarded this class as being “the real deal.” David remarks that hailing from a martial arts foundation (like George in Wing Chun Kung Fu) is actually “a double-edge sword”, as those students tend to pick up physical techniques and sequences rather quickly, but retain a great deal of tension—especially in the pelvis region. He once remarked, “You’ve got the movements, but are trying to find something with them [in terms of self-defence applications]”. Instead, students are encouraged to focus on their own bodies and minds rather than an imaginary opponent. This focus is supposed to be relatively light-hearted, as encouraged by the soft jokes and accessible analogies, as too much mental focus (yi-intent) is not seen as beneficial for sustained periods of time. Instead, the practitioner is urged to pay attention to their bodies to then try to release tension in specific areas, such as the sternum and solar plexus at an intermediate level, which George is now working on. After years of Taijiquan training, David claims that the cultivation of body and mind will manifest in specific ways: “You’ll feel taller and lighter after this [training session]. All internal arts give you a light-hearted view on life”.
David has decades of training in Shotokan Karate, and he has admitted on several occasions—often demonstrating a forward stance and basic Karate punch—that “it took me years to sink my pelvis”. George’s own challenge is to relax the pelvis so that is tilts forwards naturally without any physical intervention such as the “tucking” encouraged in his previous Wing Chun schools. While in the basic standing posture (wuji), David will walk around the students in their two rows, checking on their alignments and for any pockets of tension in their bodies. This tension is attributed to stress within the mind, and specific exercises are followed to encourage students to loosen their bodies and become accustomed to discomfort in the small muscles and ligaments around the scapula (rather than the deltoids) and the soles of the feet—often overlooked regions in Western modes of exercise. One student, Luke, once said after the class: “Only you can cause yourself stress. It’s just if you let things stress you out”. Peter, a senior student, replied: “Yeah. Just look at workmates in the office. Some have weeks off on sick leave. While others come in bright and breezy (whistles and smiles). They’re doing the same job! But what’s different is how things affect them”.
The tension is also linked to potential trauma built into the mind and body which the human being cannot simply “shake off”, unlike wild animals (as David once remarked about antelopes immediately recovering after being chased by a lion). Indeed, trauma-informed approaches to martial arts are increasingly popular (see, for example, the Conscious Combat Club), and some members of the group advocate the teachings of the bestselling Hungarian-Canadian author Gabor Maté, as expressed in the acclaimed documentary
The Wisdom of Trauma [
43]. Indeed, certain members of the Taijiquan class’s WhatsApp group (set up during the COVID-19 lockdown) such as Aidan (another key informant) wrote praising comments about Maté’s approach to dealing with trauma built up and retained within the body without people’s conscious awareness of such suffering—even decades after a trauma-inducing event in people’s childhood or young adulthood. In the film, Maté claims that the majority of adults living in the world are living with the remnants of trauma within the way that they hold themselves, interact with others and perceive the world. Taijiquan offers people a deep experience of specific regions of the body that enable one to shut off from the worries of everyday life, as seen from this field note from the first year of George’s training:
During class, I felt heat expanding across my back as it was extended and my chest relaxed. Sweat formed across the small of my back—across the entire lumbar region. My feet muscles ached across my arches. The balls of my feet (what David termed “the bubbling spring point’” or Kidney One point) ached due to the suspension of all my bodyweight).
David is adamant that Taijiquan is “like nothing else, except other internal practices” which become deeper as you progress: “Once you go beyond the movements, Taiji is a state of mind”. David has likened this to the discovery of an alternative world, as in the Victorian novella
Flatland, a satire using the analogies of worlds of lines, shapes and three dimensions [
44]. This alternative reality relates to comments on the deeper “energy body”, which can be understood as a subtle body that cannot be measured from an external scientific perspective (see [
45]). However, David did admit that Taijiquan has its closest parallels with meditation. Although some of the preparatory stretches are akin to those seen in yoga, David stresses that they “are quite particular to what we do”. This leads the students to pay attention—using their
ting—on specific regions of the body, starting with the head alignment and pelvis, moving into the groin region (kua), considering the compression and release of the feet (a region not explained in Chinese terms), and later the waist and sides of the torso (
yao). This finally reaches the connections between the hands and the feet, in which “the sinews of your toes connect into the sinews of your fingers”, for “in the beginning, the hands are not important. Later on, they are one of the most important parts”. David instructs his students to repeat the same motions dozens—and often hundreds—of times within a single class, stressing the mantra of “it’s how you do it, not what you do” and “learn less, practice more”, which was once expanded to a paraphrasing of the 10,000 things in Daoism (see [
46]): “I don’t fear the man who has 10,000 techniques; I fear the man who has one technique he’s practised 10,000 times”. As a Shotokan Karate black belt with martial arts training since his late teens, David sometimes refers to his foundational art, making reference to the book
Five Years,
One Kata [
47] as an exemplar of this kind of mindset of deep training and unpacking of one pedagogic, formulaic sequence (see [
48]) over the training of many forms in a superficial manner. This unpacking is seen as a form of reverse engineering, as explained by one story that David is keen to recount to his students, from when he encountered a professional who repaired coffee makers: “Most coffee machines are made from the outside in; real coffee machines are made from the inside out”. For David and many Taijiquan teachers, Taiji is an internal martial art that builds the body from the inside out. Indeed, David often tells students, “you’ve got to build the Taiji body. It’s just like a bodybuilder’s got to build a bodybuilder body”.
Even the final closing-down posture is taken with a deep dose of mindfulness (a term that has been employed in recent years), where we students have been encouraged to “think of nothing in particular for one minute”. David often reminds students about the healthy balance of focus and attention: “With intention, but not too much intention. A reasonable amount of intention”. This balance is somewhere on a sliding scale in between daydreaming (the “dull” or “acquired mind” as in when relaxing on the beach) and overt straining on an action (“it’s not a willpower thing!”)—both of which are seen as detrimental to the cultivation process.
The same balance is needed in the song process (relaxation), in which the Taijiquan practitioner actively avoids tension but also the excessive floppiness of the limbs. Such a balance is enabled by another duality, stillness and movement, which are mixed into any given class; as David summarised: “The thread that holds the beads together. Static and moving, static and moving”. This is manifested in holding postures—especially the foundational stance wuji—and moving within parts of the form sequence and eventually the entire form itself. As David once reflected: “Anyone can relax on the floor…but how many people can relax standing up without collapsing their body? Not many. It’s highlighting the tension…where your muscles are tensing”.
Overall, the concepts of song and ting (or ting and song) cannot be separated, as they rely one another; to relax (or release tension), we must focus on relaxing specific parts of the body, and this relaxation in terms helps us reduce the tight focus to a gentle awareness of the body. This enables us to “put the mind into the body” or enable “presence in the body” as David has uttered at times. These principles are later tested with a training partner through push hands and other cooperative exercises, such as testing people’s transitions between postures by progressively pressing against their limbs. This contrasts somewhat with Papineau’s views on the role of the mind in achievement sports (in Chapter one), where one should avoid focusing the specific mechanics or elements of a skill. In the Taijiquan class, the practitioner is not concerned with a sporting strategy, such as where to return the ball in a tennis match, but fixes their mind deep into very specific parts of their anatomy.
Following the duality if yin and yang, David often contrasts what we are supposed to be doing with what is incorrect. On one occasion, the direct opposite of song and ting are physical and mental tension summarised in the 3Cs:
“I was inspired by the G7 [recent political gathering]…they have the 3Cs: Climate change, COVID and China. And we have our 3Cs: Compression, collapse and contraction”, laughed David with Piotr, one of his senior students from Poland.
This final field notes extract reflects the creative and often spontaneous development of analogies and slogans within this specific Taijiquan school. Other sayings are likely to be created in different classes around the world to fit their language and culture, but what unites them is the core Chinese principles of song and ting. Another aspect of Taijiquan that is common across schools is the focus on constant practice. There is no emphasis on competition in this School of Internal Arts, as the students are in what Papineau [
2] calls “practice mode”. They are, therefore, not in danger of “the yips” described in Chapter 3 of Papineau’s book—nerves that are exacerbated by the need to perform a finite set of sporting skills under pressure from the audience and cameras (as in sports such as golf). Although there is sometimes a performative element in Taijiquan, as in when advanced students demonstrating the form in front of junior students, it is not judged and measured as in sport. The group learn the art indoors within a community centre and in their own homes online, rather than the stereotypical park setting. No one’s record is tarnished if they make a mistake. In fact, in five years’ fieldwork, George has not witnessed or experienced severe anxiety in relation to the physical execution of techniques and movements. This illustrates another difference between a martial art concerned with practice and ritual and a combat sport focused on performance and records. Indeed, there is a sense of playfulness in Taijiquan, and in some schools, their practitioners are referred to as “players”. This is akin to Capoeira, where ideas around a deeper force within and between people, jokes and joy are emphasised on a regular basis.
5.2. Axé and Malicia: Two Examples from Capoeira
In this section, two fundamental aspects of Capoeira,
malícia and
axé, with roots deep in the African-Brazilian (and, therefore, the African) origins, philosophy and history of the dance–fight–game, are explained and explored. The section demonstrates how, in this martial art, core values are better contextualised with African-origin concepts than with “Western” ones. Merrell [
49] is an explicit attempt to explore the religious roots of Capoeira. The two concepts fundamental to Capoeira have parallels in Papineau’s [
2] Chapters 6 and 13 on fair play and on race and ethnicity. One of Papineau’s chapters (6) is about cheats or “cads”, and a second (Chapter 13) focuses on racism tied to notions of race and ethnicity. Twenty years of ethnographic immersion in Capoeira classes in the UK (see [
22]) allows us to argue that the core principles of Papineau’s two chapters on race and on cads need to be inverted for any analysis of the philosophy of Capoeira. Firstly, being a cad, and not playing fair, is a fundamental skill in good Capoeira players, and secondly the most admired and respected Capoeira players are African-Brazilian men who can be called
malandros: a folkloric, symbolic, living trickster figure in urban Brazil.
Cheating in sport and racial prejudice are used by Papineau [
2] to explore philosophical debates around “fair play” and race equality. Cad is a deliberately old-fashioned term in British English, mostly obsolete today. It was used in English novels and stories (it was not common in Scottish and Welsh literatures) in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In that fiction, both Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey are fit men who train regularly in a “Japanese” martial art (e.g., Baritsu (the misspelling of the Victorian-Edwardian martial art of Bartitsu) for Holmes), and use it to defeat criminals and thugs. An upper-class or upper-middle class hero, such as Raffles, Bertie Wooster, Dr. Watson (the companion of Sherlock Holmes), and Lord Peter Wimsey, would use the term cad to shame a man of a similar social class who broke the code of that subculture. Behaving improperly to a lady, cheating at cards or sport (especially cricket) or failing to honour financial obligations would provoke this deliberately offensive epithet.
In his chapter on cads, Papineau’s [
2] focus is the importance of “fair play”. He explores “the players’ own understandings of where the limits [of fair play] lie in a range of sports,’ because each sport has its own sense of fair play” (p. 89). In the “cads” chapter, he explores the limited literature on gamesmanship, and recounts examples of famous players who challenged the rules and the fair play conventions of their sports. Our argument here is that Capoeira routinely inverts the idea of fair play described by Papineau as central to “Western” philosophy and “Western” sports.
In Capoeira, which is partly taught and learnt in its native Brazilian Portuguese, students acquire knowledge from their teachers and fellow students, from the songs that always accompany Capoeira play, and also from films, books, websites and other social media. The following terms can be translated, but are generally retained in Portuguese. The
malandro is an urban African-Brazilian working-class man who paradoxically does not work. As a typically heterosexual male, a voyeuristic
flaneur in urban centres (see [
50]), he floats through the streets in a white suit—a symbol that he does no manual work, unlike other African-Brazilian men who sweat at manual labour. The malandro lives off women, or by outsmarting other men, and by gambling. He is a skilled dancer, especially at carnival time, an accomplished lover, and a great Capoeira player. He is a cad. Metaphorically, the term can be applied to a football (soccer) player who moves very well, makes love to the ball, and outwits his opponents. Applied to the late Pelé, it was a great compliment. The
malandro is lauded in songs, and in fiction, especially the magical realist novel by Jorge Amado [
51],
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands. Dona Flor’s first husband was a malandro. After his death, she marries a pharmacist who has nearly every virtue but is a dull lover. Luckily, the ghost of her dead husband comes to her at night to make love to her so she has the best of both worlds: economic security and sensual pleasure.
The malandro is clearly a cad, but all men who play Capoeira have a whiff of the cad because of malícia. Malícia is fundamental to Capoeira and is enacted by the Capoeira player and the malandro. The word Malícia looks as if it means malice, but it is better understood as trickery and deceit, “street-smarts” or cunning. It is related to mandinga and malandragen, both words for magic. All three ideas are understood to be forms of knowledge and skill that have African origins in the beliefs and practices of West Africa that came to Brazil with the enslaved peoples.
Capoeira involves learning explicitly taught and drilled physical moves such as kicks and escapes. Games in the
roda (the circle of musicians and singers) need some mastery of the moves, but also doing them in time with the music, and most importantly in a dialogue with an opponent or partner [
52]. Learners need to acquire a tacit, indeterminate form of ringcraft, in which
malicía is fundamental. A good Capoeira player uses deception and trickery, and is ever watchful for it to be deployed against them.
Fair play is not expected: the player is a cad. Using
malicía on children or novices is not acceptable, but between consenting adults it is a requirement. The good Capoeira player deceives like a conjurer or magician. It is expected that good players will deceive the opponent if s/he is too naïve, dim-witted or inattentive and will fall for
malícia. However, malícia has its limits, as there are boundaries of conduct set within the roda—even among consenting adults. Breaking the rules and causing damage to one’s training partner are normally seriously frowned upon.
In general, however, deceptions are very funny for the people in the roda and any audience. Stories about malicía are told and retold for weeks after an incident. Once, when Sara was in a routine class and asked the teacher about a performance in a night club the previous weekend, he replied with an enormous grin:
‘Oh Sara it went well. It was so funny. I wasn’t concentrating and Sycamore took me down!’
Sycamore is a small woman, but had caused the experienced, athletic male teacher to fall onto the floor.
Papineau [
2] asks, rhetorically, “is it always unacceptable for athletes to try to unsettle their opponent?” (p. 87). Any Capoeira player would be adamant that their sport depends on unsettling the opponent.
Malícia is fundamental to Capoeira practice, yet instructors are adamant it cannot be
taught. Sara was at a big event with several world-famous masters present, where public questions could be asked, and enquired “Can the
mestres tell us if
malicía can be taught?” A young
mestre, with good English, translated the enquiry and the answers for the whole hall. The assembled
mestres agreed that Brazilians do not need to be taught it, or rather Brazilians who “do not grow up with a tennis court” but instead grow up in the streets, acquire it in the streets, have it “naturally”. But non-Brazilians do not have “street smarts” from childhood so they need to acquire
malicía while learning Capoeira, but it cannot be
taught: it can only be learnt from watching games and playing in
rodas (see [
53]).
Varela [
54] (p. 95) offers this account of a famous
mestre “bewitching” him in a
roda, demonstrating his
mandinga or
malandragem.
When we began to play, I felt very comfortable playing with him—very at ease. This was not an easy task… I thought for a second that I had really improved my game strategies…Then Valmir asked “Are you ready”? At first I did not understand, but I felt that something in the air had changed… I am at a loss for words to explain what happened. All my confidence collapsed, and I couldn’t move. Suddenly Valmir looked immense and I was nervous with fear. We began…but I was caught.
He was kicked, taken down, and head butted. He had been completely humiliated. What Varela had learnt was:
The power of a mestre is real whether or not you subscribe to that power…Its source may be spiritual, but its effects are here in the world.
Varela [
54] came away with an insight into the philosophy of Capoeira. His experience:
Made me wonder about reaching a concept of power that defies or goes beyond the realm of Western conceptualisation.
We have stressed that malícia is an essential element in skilled Capoeira play, but cannot be explicitly taught. Axé, to which we now turn, is equally essential for a good Capoeira class, game or festival, and if it is missing, experienced students and teachers can feel its absence: the class, the game, the festival is flat, lifeless and joyless.
In the accounts given to Capoeira students, and in songs,
malicía is represented as a skill which was fundamentally necessary for the survival of African-Brazilians, especially men, as enslaved people, and as an underclass in the society after the slaves were liberated. Deceit and trickery were essential for keeping some self-respect and autonomy while being oppressed individually and as a group. One famous song has a refrain that says “
Vou dizer a meu senhor que a manteiga derramou” (“I’ll tell the master that the butter spilled”) when in fact the slaves have stolen it (words translated from [
55] p. 90), and students are explicitly taught this was an example of using “
malicía” for survival.
In Papineau’s chapter (13) on race, the examples are all about players of African, African-Caribbean, or African-American origin being banned from sport, discriminated against, and being regularly insulted by fans. While the philosophical arguments about racial and ethnic equity are applicable to Capoeira, in its practice, the racial hierarchy is inverted. While the rhetoric is that all races can play and everyone is welcome, there is no doubt at all that the founding fathers and most respected masters were and still are African-Brazilians. Authenticity is attributed to African-Brazilians who can teach about slavery, the history of Capoeira,
malicía,
axé and the African-Brazilian religions from their own bodies, family histories, experiences of racism and so on. Old age adds gravitas to African-Brazilian teachers. A famous modern Capoeira song “Sometimes they call me a Negro” says that if non-Capoeira people call “white” players “Negro” they may think it is an insult, but for a Capoeira player of
any race it is high praise, because the African-Brazilians used Capoeira to fight for freedom, and any Capoeirista can feel proud to practice it as part of that struggle [
34].
Papineau [
2] reflects on race and ethnicity in sport using two philosophical sources: James [
56] and Appiah [
57]. In his “race” chapter, Papineau explores the arguments for driving racism out of sport. He includes a sympathetic account of the Rachel Dolezal case of racial self-identification (e.g., an American descendant of Europeans passing as an African-American). Papineau’s overall stance is that, now science has entirely abandoned the idea that there is any scientific basis for biological races, although popular opinion that race is “biological” and “real” continues to exist, people should be free to choose whatever “race” or “ethnicity” they wish to identify with. Our discussion of
axé can be seen to develop Papineau’s arguments about race in Western sports.
A more clearly religious idea than malicia axé refers to the power of the African gods and goddesses that can be drawn down and harnessed to affect human affairs. Axé is the power central to the African-Brazilian religions of Candomblé and Umbanda, which are forms of spirit possession. In Capoeira, axé is the power or energy that is created by good Capoeira singing and instrumental music, and itself drives the play. Important analogies sometimes draw on modern materials, just like in the case of Taijiquan. As a mestre (master) observed, ‘Axé is the petrol that drives the engine: you create the petrol’. Axé is so fundamental to Capoeira, and so firmly an African and African-Brazilian concept, that Capoeira players all over the world, of any race, are told that good Capoeira depends on good axé, and that creating and sustaining the good axé are their responsibility. They have to clap the rhythms loudly, sing lustily, play the instruments with enthusiasm and open their bodies to receive and reflect the axé.
Teachers explain that
axé is African in origin and refers to the powers of the
orixas—the gods and goddesses of the religion that in Brazil is called
Candomblé (in Cuba, it is
Santeria, and in Haiti,
Voudou). These are religions based on spirit possession: in ceremonies, the
orixas are called, and can descend to possess believers. While possessed, experienced believers can harness the power (
axé) and use it to tell fortunes, diagnose problems and heal the sick. Floyd Merrell [
49], an expert on C.S. Peirce, is a Capoeira player and has deep interests in Candomblé. His position is that Candomblé and Capoeira are grounded so completely in their African origins and the history of slavery in Brazil that they only make sense if understood together. He argues that Candomblé is “a rich philosophy of life” which:
Is also more than the sort of intellectual Western philosophy that remains divorced from concrete living: it involves bodymindspirit as a whole (p. 103).
Varela [
38] explores the “religious” foundations of Capoeira. Stephens and Delamont [
39] explore
axé in diasporic Capoeira at greater length than is appropriate here. Sansi and Parés [
58] provide a thorough overview of the social science literature on Afro-Brazilian religions. In the UK, novice Capoeira students who ask what
axé is are told by more experienced students to think of it like “The Force” in the
Star Wars universe, or the Brazilian equivalent of the Chinese
Qi/Chi. In Wales, where we are based,
axé can be related to a Welsh force,
hwyl, that has no English equivalent, but is used to characterise the force that can drive a rugby team or a choir to unimagined heights. Indeed, there are connections between the singing of hymns and the performance of rugby, with the history of the Welsh national anthem stemming from a local hymn [
59]. Religion, music and sport can also be inextricably linked, as in Capoeira.
Capoeira axé is not believed to be the manifestation of supernatural powers in this world, and is used more metaphorically. Some African-Brazilian teachers are initiated Candomblé practitioners or believers; others are not adherents of the religion, but all expect their students to “know” that axé is a kind of energy that the enslaved Africans brought to Brazil. Capoeira students outside Brazil are not expected to believe in the orixas—their religious beliefs are their private concern—but they do need to learn how to generate good axé in their Capoeira classes for everyone’s benefit. In conversation, “the axé was great” is a quick way to characterise whether a class, game or event was successful. A Capoeira teacher will be described positively as one whose “Axé is great” and a dull one as “his classes have no axé”. Individual students use axé to explain their own performances, saying the axé was high when they are pleased with their game, and that they cannot feel the axé when they play poorly. Just as there is a well-known Capoeira song that celebrates malícia (and there are others celebrating being a magician, or using magic), there are songs that celebrate axé. One commonly used song has the simple chorus “Bahia Axé, Axé Bahia”; Salvador de Bahia in the north east of Brazil is celebrated as the heartland of Capoeira.
Papineau argues that focusing on sport can challenge philosophical ideas. A study of Capoeira certainly raises questions about his position on fair play and on racial equality, because it is a martial art in which being a cad is essential, “fair play” is replaced by “malicía” and the concept of axé is so widely deployed that Capoeira students learn of a space where African-Brazilian people and their ancestral beliefs are revered over European people, and learn that the latter’s seemingly mainstream worldviews are not universal.