GREG DOWNEY

Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical

Education and Enculturation in an
Afro-Brazilian Art
ABSTRACT Imitation plays a crucial role in apprenticeship in the Afro-Brazilian performance genre capoeira, as in many skills across
cultures. In this article, I examine the interactional dynamics of imitative pedagogy in capoeira to better understand physical education
as a form of bodily enculturation. The ability to learn through imitation is widely considered a hallmark of our species. Imitative ability,
however, is a social accomplishment rather than a capacity of the learner in isolation. Human models often provide assistance to novices
seeking to imitate, including a variety of forms of what educational theorists call scaffolding, which are astutely structured to a
novices ability, perceptions, and even neurology. Scaffolding techniques vary. I here examine how instructors reduce students degrees of
movement freedom, reorient their model in perceptual space, and parse complex sequences into component gestures. Close analysis of
pedagogical interaction highlights the divergence between forms of instruction and practical skills being taught. [Keywords: capoeira,
sport, training, embodiment, cultural transmission]

HE MESTRE, or teacher, Joao Grande (Big John)

arrived in New York City in 1990 and soon opened
a school of capoeira. Because he is one of the most respected proponents of the Afro-Brazilian martial art and
dance, Brazilians lamented to me during field research in
Brazil in the 1990s that the mestre resided abroad. In spite of
their misgivings, however, they still commented buoyantly
that Joao Grandes school was thriving and that his students
seemed to learn well from the mestre. Brazilian practitioners seemed to take vicarious pride in Joao Grandes success;
it signaled increasing international recognition for their
art and the possibility of material success through the art.
Andre Luiz Lace Lopes, a long-time proponent of capoeira,
for example, wrote in 1994 that he found students in the
Manhattan school with a capoeira-like sentiment much
purer than that of many practitioners that I see playing in
Rio de Janeiro (1995:6970).
Capoeira is an acrobatic, danced game done to distinctive vocal and instrumental music. Derived from African
challenge dances and shaped by slavery, urban gangs, and
official repression throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries in Brazil, capoeira today has become a form of physical education and martial art found around the world. In
a capoeira game, or jogo, two players strive to outmaneuver, trip, or knock each other to the ground using a

wide array of kicks, head butts, leg sweeps, and evasive maneuvers. At the same time, they balance aggression with a
need to demonstrate dexterity, creativity, and artistic flair
in response to changes in music provided by a small orchestra. The games movement repertoire includes difficult acrobatic techniques, and the demanding art typically requires
several years of dedicated apprenticeship before students
really feel confident to play.1
When I moved to New York City in 1998 and had the
opportunity to visit Mestre Joao Grandes school, I found
the students skills met expectations heightened by acclaim
like that of Lopes, a popular Brazilian writer on capoeira
(see, e.g., 1995). The students abilities impressed even
more, however, when it became obvious that the mestre
still did not speak English, and that many non-Brazilian
students had only rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese, if
any at all. Novice capoeira students always learn a great deal
by imitating in contemporary practiceas students do in
physical disciplines across many culturesbut the imitative
channel in Joao Grandes school was shorn of supportive instruction for many students. Joao Grande would often call a
senior student, signal what he wanted to demonstrate with
vague hand gestures and monosyllables, and then perform a
complementary defense and counterattack to the students
attack, creating an exercise that the students paired off to

C 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 110, Issue 2, pp. 204213, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. 
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00026.x

Downey
imitate. Demonstration and attempts to imitate took up a
great portion of the communication between mestre and
students.
Whether they pick the art up informally, as veteran
players insist was once the norm, or through physical
educationstyle classes, imitative learning forms the backbone of capoeira apprenticeship in virtually all settings I
have observed in Brazil, Australia, and the United States.
To learn capoeira techniques, novices carefully watch experienced players, haltingly try to copy techniques, rehearse
movements over and over again until they become expert, and, in turn, become models for other novices. They
tend to learn the arts movements and musical techniques
by seeing and doing them rather than by talking about
themeven when instructors and students share a language. But practitioners do not consider imitation alone
to be sufficient to learn the art. As Mestre Joao Pequeno
(Little John, in contrast to his close friend, Joao Grande)
allegedly told one of my informants: if watching were sufficient to learn capoeira, the stray dogs that lazed about
his academy should long ago have become mestres themselves. As I observed pedagogical contexts like Mestre Joao
Grandes academy, where imitation seemed to be carried
out without other forms of communication, I realized that
imitative learning itself was a complex, two-way form of interaction, in which the model was far from a simple object
of observation.
IMITATION, ENCULTURATION, AND ENSKILLMENT
Imitative learning in a host of settings demonstrates the
extraordinary mimetic facility of humans, a trait that
many theorists argue is essential to the capacity for culture (see, e.g., Caldwell and Whiten 2002; Donald 1991;
Heyes 1993; Hurley and Chater 2005; Tomasello 1999a,
1999b; Tomasello et al. 1993). As early as the end of the
19th century, psychologist Edward Thorndike (1898) observed that imitation, rather than being a trait possessed
by many species, was rather rarer than deductive, trial-anderror learning. The ease with which humans imitate may
make practical mimesis appear to be a simple channel for
enculturation or learning when it is in fact a signature of
a distinctly human intelligence. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, although he elsewhere examines physical education
in great detail, in his prospectus for a sociology of sport
describes imitative learning in almost mystical terms: the
teaching of a bodily practice . . . occurs, in the greatest degree, outside the field of conscious awareness, . . . learnt by
a silent communication, from body to body one might say
(1990:166).
A close examination of imitative learning in many
ethnographic settings reveals that the faculty is not merely
a result of the novice learners intelligence or observational
skills in isolation, nor is it always outside the field of
conscious awareness. Rather, imitation is often supported
by sophisticated, subtle teaching techniques, even in informal education. By drawing attention to the forms and

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205

variety of practical support, including conscious elaboration, I hope to highlight the social nature of human imitation and the distinctive forms of intelligence involved
in teaching through modeling and imitation. Psychologists David Wood and colleagues suggest that the ability
to learn is not the only effect of high intelligence, so is
the capacity to teach (1976:89; see also Wood 1986:194
195). The subtle, sophisticated ways in which imitation
can be supported demonstrate pedagogical skill and the
inherent self-reflexivity of most teaching, even in physical activities such as dance, sport, and manual skills,
and even when no explicit instruction accompanies the
model.
At the same time, ethnographic studies of cultural
transmission reveal that imitation is interactive rather than
unidirectional. What Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld
(2007) call the microprocesses of cultural transmission
may include quite complex forms of movement analysis,
abstraction, and selective demonstration by teachers. Pedagogical interaction often demands that the model not simply enact a practice but also provide other sorts of stimulation and direction tailored to the novices needs. We
imitate well because we typically do not imitate indifferent models.2 Moreover, as I discuss, neurological research
on imitative learning provides inspiration to rethink everyday educational processes, not merely how novices copy
new techniques but also how a teacher might facilitate that
learning through specific forms of bodily interaction.
In his landmark discussion of techniques of the body,
Marcel Mauss argues that apprenticeship occurs in all bodily
skills, pointing out that even resting postures are laboriously acquired (1973:81). Ethnographic studies of sports,
dance, and other physical skills strongly support Mausss
assertion, showing how techniques of the body are finely
tuned and arduously sought, even though the resulting
practice of the expert may appear effortless (see, e.g., Alter 1992; Bale 1996; Novack 1990; Wacquant 2003). Just as
physical education necessarily involves cognitive and perceptual learning, even such sedentary intellectual tasks as
reading entail forms of bodily training: novice readers must
learn to track lines of text visually and suppress extraneous
or disruptive motion (for review, see Rayner 1998). Critical studies of education have amply demonstrated that
classroom instruction includes significant bodily and behavioral training, often a mode of social discipline, and a
students failure to behave physically in appropriate ways
can be treated as an intellectual inadequacy (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1984; MacLeod 2004; Willis 1977).
MOVEMENT EDUCATION
Capoeira was once practiced primarily by working-class
black and mixed-raced men in Brazils northeast as a form
of entertainment, challenge dance, and festive activity.
Transformed into a martial art and fitness activity, the art
spread widely and is now performed by men and women,
adults and children, around the world. Although still not as

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well-known as Asian-originated martial arts such as judo,

tae kwon do, or aikido, capoeiras spectacular gymnastic
techniques have helped to make the art a media darling: one
can see capoeira in video games, television commercials,
music videos, and Hollywood movies (see also Assuncao
2005:12).
Anthropologists, historians, and scholars of performance have tended to focus their attention on capoeiras
historical development, resistance to oppression, status as
an African cultural expression in Brazil, and distinctiveness
among performance traditions: combining dance, music,
oral history, sparring, acrobatics, and playful theater, some
observers argue it is a genre category to itself (Lewis 1995;
see also Browning 1995; Lewis 1992). Capoeira practitioners are quick to point out that the art survived in spite
of social stigma and periodic repressionin part because
of its pedagogical flexibility and resourcefulness. The word
capoeira was long associated with gang activity in Rio de
Janeiro. In contrast, in the northeastern city of Salvador,
men formed capoeira rodas, or public rings, at popular
festivals to entertain and earn money from spectators (see
Assuncao 2005:70127; Downey 2005; Lewis 1992; Soares
1994).
Prior to capoeiras treatment as physical education,
most practitioners learned through one-on-one instruction,
observation, and self-guided practice. Mestre Gigante asserted, In the old days, there were no academies. Only
during the day, on Sunday, did you have the vagrancy
[capoeira] in the street (Vieira 1990:119). In these settings,
imitative learning would have been at least as important
as in contemporary practice. In an open forum, one older
mestre described how as a novice he would observe techniques in public rodas among experts and then go to the
beach to try the acrobatic movements in the sand where he
was less likely to injure himself. In addition, novice players
were, and still are, initiated through what Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger labeled legitimate-peripheral participation
(1991). They take on minor, technically less-demanding
tasks during performance. For example, in contemporary
rodas, inexperienced players are entrusted with supporting
musical instruments that play restricted rhythms with minimal improvisation.
Since the first capoeira academies (academias) in the
1930s, teaching has, in large part, been definitively separated from games or free play, and instruction has become
professionalized (although one is hard pressed to make a living by instruction in Brazil). The Portuguese verb treinar, to
train, has entered the capoeira lexicon. One older mestre
joked in an interview that it was ironic practitioners now
trained at something that was once called vadiaca
o, idleness or vagrancy. Although novices are encouraged to
enter the capoeira ring, they are expected to prepare by
training outside it. In one academy I visited, students were
strictly forbidden from playing at weekend rodas unless
they had attended a training session during the previous
week.

For the most part, capoeira schools practice what Claudia Strauss (1984) termed ill-defined pedagogies: training
differs widely between groups, even between instructors
and their assistants in a single group, and very few have
fixed, progressive pedagogies or systematic exercises (there
are exceptions to this statement, as to most assertions about
the fractious community of practitioners). Demonstrations
are often devised interactively on the spot, in response to
opportunities or errors that an instructor perceives while
observing students. Most exercises are simply movements
isolated and practiced so that they might later be reincorporated into the game.
Even those instructors who have devised systematized
pedagogical systems often neglect them in class. For example, teachers of Capoeira Regional, the style of the art created
by the legendary Mestre Bimba, often fail to teach even
the eight basic sequencias, or interactive combinations, that
were the mestres movement primer. In other academies, I
received photocopies of syllabi but found them either very
general or impractical for use in instruction. Most fixed,
elaborate pedagogies, in my observation, were attempts to
enforce uniformity that translated poorly into practice, or
efforts to win the art greater legitimacy in the eyes of nonpractitioners. That is, systematic pedagogies were more for
appearances in the physical education community than actually effective in shaping training. For example, Carlos
Senna, an influential advocate of capoeira linked to the
police and military in the 1970s and 1980s, devised elaborate nationalist pedagogies, including descriptions of technically perfect movements and systems to score competitions (e.g., Senna 1980). In fact, his rationalizing efforts
had little lasting effect on capoeira practice, except for the
introduction of belt schemes and other cosmetic changes
(see Downey 2002).

SCAFFOLDING
Imitative learning in capoeira is facilitated by what educational theorist Lev Vygotsky called more capable peers
(1978:86). The more knowledgeable other serves as both
model and instructor, interacting with the novice and responding to his or her distinctive developmental needs
when classes are small. Wood and colleagues (1976:90)
point out that what might appear to be simple modeling and imitation on closer examination is often much
more complex, with practical as well as verbal interventions
by the tutor. A more knowledgeable other, like a capoeira
mestre or other teacher, often assists in practical ways, such
as altering or exaggerating the movement to be emulated,
isolating a particularly tricky portion of a sequence, coaching through difficult stages, or redirecting the novices attention.3 Wood and colleagues christened the assistance
rendered by the tutor as scaffolding, arguing that such
aid allows a learner to perform tasks that are initially beyond his or her ability alone (see also Bliss et al. 1996).
Scaffolding as a pedagogical technique allows the learner

Downey
to engage directly in the sorts of tasks performed in normal skilled action, rather than simplified tasks, exercises,
or other learning activities (such as listening to lectures
or explanations). As Bruner describes, scaffolding serves as
a vicarious form of consciousness until such time as the
learner is able to master his own action through his own
consciousness and control (1986:123). The instructors assistance helps to control the learners body, allowing the
student to execute actions that will eventually flow with
much less effort. When the novice becomes more competent, scaffolding is incrementally withdrawn or faded
(see Pea 2004:431). Some educational contexts do include
unscaffolded imitation: old guard capoeia practitioners, for example, talk about learning by imitating techniques alone, without any assistance, prior to the advent
of capoeira schools, and some physical disciplines demand
unassisted imitation for pedagogical reasons.
In contrast to the neglect of fixed pedagogy, ad hoc
scaffolding of imitation is widespread in capoeira training and often arises spontaneously, rather than through
premeditation or deliberate design. Typically, in a pedagogical interaction involving scaffolding, an instructor first
demonstrated a target movement or combinationsuch as
an attack, escape, and counterattackas it would be done
in a game. The sequence might be done with or without a
partner, and the pace might be slowed down slightly from
that which is normal during play. The students would then
attempt to imitate. If students did not quickly copy the sequence, the instructor frequently provided additional scaffolding assistancesometimes for the whole group, sometimes just for those individuals who needed additional support.
For example, Joao Grande often did intricate escapes
(saidas) and counterattacks that were too fast and complicated to be instantly copied. After the students looked about
with obvious consternation, he could usually be induced to
provide extra assistance for imitation: he might repeat the
movement more slowly or break a sequence into smaller,
easier-to-grasp component steps. Or Joao Grande might halt
briefly at a reference point during the movements trajectory, highlighting a crucial posture that made subsequent
movement easier, especially if he thought students were
likely to get it wrong. His scaffolding revealed his attention to specific errors and his sense of what parts of a
technique were problematic.
Although the term scaffolding is not found in his work,
the concept is generally considered part of sociocultural
learning theory inspired by Vygotsky (see, e.g., Hobsbaum
and Peters 1996; Wood and Wood 1996). Vygotskys pedagogical theories were grounded in his observations of
normal developmental processes, especially the everyday interactions of children that facilitated their gradual
achievement of typical abilities, such as native speech acquisition or literacy (see 1962, 1978). Vygotskys discussion of the social bases of development recognized cultural
differences in educational trajectories and has been fruit-

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fully applied in anthropological approaches to child development (see, e.g., Holland and Valsiner 1988; Lima and
Emihovich 1995; Rogoff 2003).
One reason that scaffolding has been readily adopted
in Vygotskys developmental theory is that the concept
coincides well with his discussion of the zone of proximal development (1978:86ff.). For Vygotsky, the zone of
proximal development consists of problems, just beyond
their capacity in isolation, that learners might solve with
guidance by a more knowledgeable other. More difficult
problems beyond this zone are not really learnable from
a too-early stage of development; they cannot be accomplished even with scaffolding or other assistance. For this
reason, scaffolding, such as in capoeira, tends to take diverse forms as instruction incrementally pushes students
to accomplish more challenging tasks based on instructors
understandings of pedagogical progression. In addition, an
adept teacher must also be able to diagnose which actions
are in the zone of proximal development and thus susceptible to imitation; many times in capoeira classes, virtuoso
players demonstrated movements that the students considered beyond their own ability and could not imitate.

REDUCING DEGREES OF FREEDOM

One of the most difficult problems faced by a novice in a
movement discipline like capoeira is what Nicholai Bernstein (1996) identified as degrees of freedom in bodily
motion. The human body contains so many joints and
muscles, and is capable of so many sorts of movement, that
controlling the profusion of possibilities can overwhelm a
beginner. As Bernstein writes: Coordination is overcoming excessive degrees of freedom of our movement organs,
that is, turning the movement organs into controllable systems (1996:41). The problem seems to be especially difficult with capoeira movements that are least like everyday
movements, and in others because unnecessary motion upsets balance. That is, with unfamiliar movements or those
requiring delicate bodily control, unnecessary bodily freedom needs to be tamped down, but the techniques are
so unfamiliar that too many potential motions have to be
consciously suppressed at once.
One way that capoeira instructors scaffold imitation,
given the degrees of freedom problem, is by eliminating
extraneous movement possibilities. These scaffolding tactics narrow down a students potential actions, funneling
their motions toward the target. For example, instructors
may create exercises that artificially place a students body
into particular starting positions, force them to go only
one direction, or otherwise eliminate options for motion
that would disrupt the model technique (but that might
normally be available in a game).
In a simple example briefly discussed elsewhere
(Downey n.d.), a student learning the rabo-de-arraia, the
stingrays tail kick, might be provided with freedomreducing scaffolding. In the rabo-de-arraia, a player places

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both hands on the ground and pivots around on one leg

while using the other, trailing leg to kick out in a long arc.
Bent over quadripedal, the student sweeps the leg that starts
furthest from the target, and must sight the target under his
or her own body, upside down. Because the movement is
so alien to everyday movement, so counterintuitive given
prior experience, many novices do not even know where to
start. They may begin committing multiple errors at once,
kicking with the wrong leg, turning backwards, holding
the head incorrectly, failing to balance, forgetting to put
the palms flat on the ground, and a host of other problems.
So many novel sensations make up the rabo-de-arraia that
inexperienced players, left to their own devices, may not
fix very basic errors no matter how many times an expert
models correct technique for imitation.
In this case, many instructors scaffold novices early
attempts to imitate by reducing a students opportunities
to commit errors. For example, both Joao Grande and Joao
Pequeno almost always taught the rabo-de-arraia combined
with the negativa, a basic evasive technique. Although these
mestres likely had other reasons as well, putting the negativa and rabo-de-arraia in sequence made it more difficult
to commit common errors in foot placement leading to
the stingrays tail kick. Once in the negativa, only one
foot can be easily moved into position as the pivot; the
other is effectively pinned by the bodys weight. In addition, once the pivot leg has been placed, turning in the correct direction for the stingrays tail is much easier; after
the asymmetrical negativa, moving in the opposite direction requires an act of contortionism (which some students
still insist on attempting). During improvised play, the two
movements are not married so closelyone could just as
easily do either in combination with other techniques
but their pedagogical pairing helped new students. On the
surface, the sequence of two novel, physically challenging
movements might appear to increase the difficulty of either
alone. In fact, the first technique funneled students into
the second, decreasing the likelihood that certain basic errors would arise. When I tried to teach the rabo-de-arraia
without the negativa, I found students easily turned in the
wrong direction without the freedom-reducing scaffolding.
Other forms of imitative scaffolding also reduce students freedom to make movement errors. For example, my
instructors always pushed new students to practice techniques slowly. Several teachers explained that this was not
only because novices had more time to correct errors (and
were less likely to injure themselves or others). The decreased pace also exacerbated fundamental flaws, especially
problems with equilibrium, making them impossible to ignore. When faced with one physically fit, impatient novice,
an instructor demanded that the whole class slow down to
an excruciating pace. When we looked to him to explain the
exaggeratedly leaden tempo, he pointed out that the new
students muscular arms were trembling from the strain.
The novice tried to compensate with raw strength for the
fact that he was poorly balanced; the instructor slowed us

down to expose this flaw and wear the student out so that
he would have to improve his posture and equilibrium.

REORIENTING THE MODEL

Another way instructors scaffolded novices imitative learning was by reorienting their model. In a game, players face
each other, largely disregarding spectators positions, including that of novices seeking to learn. When instructors
use imitation to teach, three different orientations are possible: random, facing-toward or reflecting, and facing-away
or leading. The random orientation is common when students circle around an instructor to see a technique, and
they are expected to grasp the movement no matter where
they are positioned. This perceptual arrangement was most
common with more advanced students; it was often used
to study the more subtle points of capoeira tactics and interaction rather than when learning basic techniques. With
less experienced students or more difficult movements, instructors may switch to the reflecting or leading positions.
Reflecting instruction, in which students face the
model and do movements in the same direction, is the least
remedial type of scaffolding. Only if a group really struggles will an instructor turn his or her back on the students
and perform the movement facing in the same direction,
leading, at least in the traditionalist capoeira groups that
were my primary object of study.4 Some students struggled with the reflecting orientation, possibly because it demanded that they reverse sides of the body, doing with
the left limbs what the model did with the right and vice
versa. Especially on some of the more complex, unfamiliar
techniques, students could be confused by the perceptual
and deictic transformations that the reflecting perspective
required.
This ascending hierarchy of orientation-based scaffolding, from leading to reflecting to modeling in random directions, might have escaped my notice except for the findings
of neuropsychologists studying how movement perception
is accomplished in the brain. Neuroscientists studying motor perception have, over the past decade, described the
mirror system in the brain, a neural system that grasps
the nature and objective of another persons movement,
maps it onto an internal simulation of the same movement, and thus facilitates action understanding and imitation (see Downey n.d.).5 Phillip Jackson and colleagues
(2006) have demonstrated that the mirror system functions
more vigorously when the model is oriented in the same
directionthat is, the leading direction (see also Maeda
et al. 2002:1333). Jackson and colleagues (2006) studied
whether the visual perspective of the person attempting to
imitate affected either the imitators success or the intensity
of stimulation in the brains mirror system; both hypotheses were supported. Their findings suggest that copying
movement is facilitated by joint first-person perspective
that is, the leading orientation. In contrast, looking toward
each otherthe reflecting positionmight lead to a more

Downey
robust and broadly applicable understanding of how the
actions are configured in space (Jackson et al. 2006). Similarly, in capoeira instruction, once the basic techniques are
grasped in leading position, with a reflecting orientation
the instructor can observe to fine-tune imitated movements
and alert students to key issues, such as tactical considerations or movement variations.
PARSING OF COMPLEX TASKS
Capoeira instruction through imitation also includes a
form of scaffolding found in a range of ethnographic settings: when modeling action, instructors often break down
complex tasks into simpler stages, parsing complicated sequences into component gestures. In books that aim to
teach capoeira techniques, for example, numbered drawings or photos often represent complex kicks, escapes, or
combinations as an unfolding sequence of component gestures (e.g., Capoeira 2003). In the case of capoeira, the dissolution of complex flows of movement into components
is commonplace in instruction, especially for novices.
This sort of movement parsing into stages is so
widespread that it may appear trivial to highlight it as a
form of imitative scaffolding. On closer examination, however, the division of a smooth movement into myriad steps
can actually make the technique more kinetically difficult.
To stop in the middle of the stingrays tail kick, for example, demands greater balance and body control and requires that a student maintain an awkward bent-over posture. More acrobatic techniques done in stages can be even
more challenging, if not impossible. In one particularly difficult exercise, an instructor asked us to delay in the middle position in an au fechado, a closed cartwheel; doing
so meant balancing on ones hands while bent in half at
the waist so that the feet nearly touched the ground. Another instructor asked students to stop halfway through a
cartwheel and balance before descending into a headstand.
Both exercises met with groans from the students, and even
fairly competent performers often could not meet the requirement to parse the movements that they could do at
full speed. Capoeira instructors frequently tell students that
a technique will be easier once it is reintegrated.
Recent research on the perception of motion in the
premotor areas of the brain, however, may help shed light
on why movement parsing serves as an essential form of
imitative scaffolding even though it may make executing
movements more difficult. Specifically, studies of imitation in anthropology, ethology, and psychology have been
enriched by the discovery of mirror neurons, parts of
the brain that are stimulated equally when observing the
movements of others and when an actor him- or herself
performs the same activity. Although mirror properties in
motor neurons support imitation, Giovanni Buccino and
colleagues argue that the elementary motor representations in the mirror system are not by themselves sufficient
for learning by imitation (2004:331). Because the mirror

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209

system only picks out individual gestures and can only

match motions already in the observers repertoire, other
neural structures must orchestrate the sequencing of mirrored gestures into more complicated or novel actions:
A selection and recombination of these motor elements
is necessary to obtain an action congruent to the model
(Buccino 2004:331; see also Byrne and Russon 1998). That
is, new complex movements, like dance steps or capoeira
techniques, are built up as chains of actions, some of which
are likely to be familiar and thus detected by the neural
mirror system (see also Byrne 2002; Rizzolatti 2003). A
complex movement must thus be parsed into simple gestures that are already known, Richard Byrne (2003) suggests,
before a novel skill can be constructed. In other words, parsing by a model can aid perception of motor sequences even
though it makes execution substantially more difficult.
I want to hasten to add that the discovery of mirror
neurons does not necessarily suggest that the ability to imitate is hardwired into the brain. As the novice gains kinesthetic expertise, neuroimaging shows that the mirror system resonates with increasingly complex movements and
with new gestures, simulating techniques as they enter a
novices expanding repertoires. The brain can be trained
to perceive movement more quickly and through more
complex elementary gestures; embodied culture affects the
neurology of perception in ways that confound any simple Cartesian dualism or naturenurture divide. Beatriz
Calvo-Merino and colleagues studied expert capoeira practitioners and ballet dancers and found that the mirror
areas of their brains responded to the stimuli in a way
that depended on the observers specific motor expertise
(2004:1246). Even though movements were often kinematically very similarspins with back kicks, for example
the expert performers mirror systems would resonate most
strongly with movements they observed from their own
genres.
The advanced practitioners also demonstrated significant expertise effects on the complexity of gestures encoded
by the mirror system; expert systems seemed to code complete action patterns, not just individual component movements (Calvo-Merino et al. 2004:1246). That is, the brains
of expert practitioners seemed to perceive and simulate
bigger chunks of movement sequences. In contrast, the
brains of inexpert control subjects did not demonstrate mirror activation when witnessing complex, expert movement
techniques; the brain had to be trained up to even perceive
movements for imitation. Similarly, in capoeira instruction,
as novices become more experienced, they are expected to
grasp the movements with less minute dissectionthat is,
when presented as larger chunks of information.6 The
ethnographic evidence shows that capoeira instructors can
fade minute parsing, eventually providing longer, aggregated movement stages. Mestre Joao Grandes expert disciples could more quickly perceive and imitate sequences
than his inexperienced students because their perceptual

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systems were tuned to perceive his movements as sequences

of complicated but instantly graspable techniques.
Capoeira training, like other physical education, tends
to scaffold imitation by facilitating transposition of kinesthetic knowledge between techniques. That is, instructors
often concentrate on clusters of techniques that make use of
similar motions, postures, or dynamics because students are
better able to grasp these motions once they have learned
a single gateway technique. For example, when teaching
the stingrays tail kick and the armada, a spinning kick, an
instructor pointed out to a class I watched that the preliminary step, the one used to wind up the body and generate
stored momentum, was similar, although not identical, in
both: an odd, heel-first step toward the target. Once they
had grasped kinesthetically the initial technique, students
were able to quickly imitate a very similar motion, especially if the parallel dynamics were pointed out to them.
When Joao Grande taught a class, he frequently
showed several variants of short sequences that started with
the same defensive escape. These sequences demonstrated
a series of options to counterattack a single attack. The clustering of techniques that shared elements, a sort of kinesthetic clumping, made use of students expanding ability to
perceive motor techniques distinct to capoeira; once they
had grasped the corpeal jeito, or way, of an escape, Joao
Grande could build variants on it, substituting a cabecada,
or head butt, where he had first showed several types of
kicks. The ability to recognize longer, more complex sequences, to read them as larger chunks rather than component gestures, to replace portions with other techniques,
and to thus quickly construct and retain more complicated
combinations is consistent with the expertise-specific neural development described by Calvo-Merinos team. The
clustering is ironic, however, because Mestre Joao Grande,
when explicitly asked, expressly denied that he used any
structured pedagogy at all (Barbieri 1993:8891). In fact,
on closer examination, his teaching techniques demonstrated a consistency and astute scaffolding of student
imitation.

CONCLUSION
In capoeira education, imitation can be scaffolded in numerous ways. In this article, I discuss techniques like reducing a novices degrees of freedom, reorienting the model
in space, and parsing a movement sequence into component gestures; however, scaffolding can involve other
techniques, such as moving simultaneously with students,
marking critical features on a students own movement (to
heighten self awareness), directing a novices attention during techniques (to key inputs from the environment), fitting complimentary attacks and defenses to a technique (to
train a student when that movement is appropriate), and alleviating frustration or otherwise helping a student to manage his or her own emotions.7 In this sense, scaffolding can
be practical or discursive, or some combination of the two;

it can be more or less formal or formulaic; and it can apply to perceptual, practical, or even emotional dimensions
of a skill. Although the specific forms of scaffolding are diverse (and imitation may also be unscaffolded), taken as a
whole these pedagogical techniques draw attention to key
characteristics of skill acquisition as enculturation.
Close study of the microsocial processes of cultural
learning can lead us to better understand not only enculturation but also what culture itself might be, including
variations in human development that are behavioral, neurological, and even physiological but no less cultural
that is, induced through patterns of training.8 Tim Ingold
(2000:416417) argues that enculturation might be better
understood as enskillment, the development of learned
capacities, rather than as the internalization of collective
representations; in my opinion, both likely occur in any
enculturative setting. Recognizing that imitative learning
is often not simply a matter of modeling and copying suggests that teaching and what is learned may not identical;
enculturation often demands more of the model than simply performing everyday behaviors. One might argue that
in some contexts, competence in guiding enskillment is itself a distinct skill, over and above cultural competence.
This helps explain why, in capoeira as in other fields like
athletic coaching, the best practitioners are not always the
best teachersor even the best models to imitate.
Highlighting how instructors facilitate imitation underlines the distinctive cooperative, perceptual, and interactional mechanisms that assist individuals as they learn
cultural practices like capoeira or any other skill. Other theorists have examined the distinctive neurological, psychological, and perceptual traits that make humans so adept
at imitation (Iacoboni 2005; Iacoboni et al. 1999). Closely
examining the social ontogeny of imitative ability, the
actual settings in which imitation occurs (like a capoeira
academy), demonstrates the inherently social nature of the
capacity: humans imitate well, in part, because we provide
each other good models.
Scaffolding imitation requires diagnostic skills of the
instructor, not only to ascertain what is developmentally
proximal (in Vygotskys sense) but also to intervene appropriately and support the actions of the novice who is
learning. As Bliss and colleagues describe: This diagnosis
must be coupled with the suggested differential analysis of
domain knowledge, allowing its matching to pupils intuitive understandings (1996:60). This analysis, with the best
of capoeira instructors, leads them to construct a scaffolding that can leverage a novices competency to new levels,
reveal counterintuitive new perceptual or practical strategies to the learner, or inculcate tendencies that will serve as
a platform for later achievement. To scaffold anothers actions, personal competency is not sufficient: an instructor
who scaffolds imitation must have a more subtle ability to
perceive the points at which a novices skills are inadequate
and a flexible grasp of his or her own competency to insert
only a portion of that ability in support of the learner.

Downey
Typical scaffolding techniques, however, also shed
light on what is actually learned in imitation; that is, the
tactics of scaffolding help us to better see what transpires
in enculturation. In his study of practical skills in the
Amazon, Mark Harris argues that many models of practical knowledgeincluding Mausss influential discussion of
bodily techniquesassume that knowledge is a thing that
can be inherited and isolated from practice and context
(2005:199). Instead, borrowing from Tim Ingold (2000),
Harris argues that skills are a form of coordination between a persons body, perception, resources, tools, and
environment. In other words, learning a skill is the development within the novice of an ability to coordinate the
body with the environment. The example of capoeira apprenticeship supports the argument that skills are built up
through guided discovery, as suggested by Roy DAndrade
(1981:186), rather than passed on or transmitted (see also
Ingold 2000:349361). The metaphor of enculturation as
transmission can thus mislead on several levels: Mauss
(1973:73), for example, writes of a novice borrowing a series of movements from another person. Rather, instructors assist novices to perform tasks in their own ways and,
thus, discover their own, potentially novel, forms of skill.
As Sperber and Hirschfeld (2007) point out, variation in enculturation is the rule rather than the exception, although
the interactive nature of imitation makes it clear that this
variation is not random or purely idiosyncratic.
The metaphor of cultural transmission may also obscure the complexity of teaching. Imitative learning is only
rarely a channel through which a novice acquires expertise by simply watching it demonstrated; teaching capoeira
through imitation typically requires more than simply performing expert versions of techniques. Designating this intervention scaffolding makes it clear that the ability to
teach is not coterminous with the content of expertise,
even in imitation, but includes such interventions as limiting freedom, reorienting models, and helping a novice
to perceive through disaggregation. Seen through this lens,
enskillment is shown to be the facilitated discovery of myriad ways to be skilled, often demanding as much (or more)
observation, analysis, and reflection of the expert instructor
as of the novice learner.

GREG DOWNEY Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109 Australia
NOTES
Acknowledgments. The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research generously provided support for this article through
the Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship (GR 7414). The author would
like to thank especially Tom Boellstorff, Alex Dent, Daniel Lende,
Trevor Marchand, John Sutton, Paul Mason, Laurie Meer, Paul Bowman, and three anonymous AA reviewers for their constructive
feedback and suggestions on various earlier drafts of this article.
1 For a more complete discussion of capoeira, see Assunc
ao (2005),
Downey (2002, 2005), or Lewis (1992). Brazilian practitioners typi-

Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira

211

cally refer to capoeira as a game (jogo), which they play (jogar),

although they also sometimes say that one fights capoeira (lutar, also used for boxing and combat sports), dances (dancar), or
even, ironically, loafs or idles (vadiar) in capoeira. Because of
capoeiras indeterminate genre status (see Lewis 1992:19; Lewis
1995), I refer to capoeira as both an art and game.
2 Certainly, there are pedagogical extremes where a model refuses
to, or is incapable of, anything other than saying, as Bourdieu
puts it, Look, do what Im doing (1990:166). Elsewhere, I explore
one-way imitative learning from television broadcasts of martial
arts (Downey 2006).
3 Who should be recognized as an authority is subject to constant renegotiation and dispute, especially for those on the
cusp of the transition from student to teacher. Groups disagree even about the titles appropriate for advanced practitioners, and only the most senior mestres are universally accepted as
such by the community. Typically, a student is first recognized
as an instructor or contra-mestre (foreman, or drill leader) by
his or her own teacher; other authorities or community members may not recognize this status. In one public event I attended, a Capoeira Angola mestre, renowned for his acerbic criticism of other styles, pointedly ignored a young practitioner who
sought recognition as an instructor when the mestre called for
all mestres and teachers to step forward from the audience. In
some mestredisciple relationships, a students independence
and eventual recognition as an authorityinvariably involves a
seizure of status and ugly falling out with the students mestre,
even a switch to a new group or mestre who is more welcoming.
One reviewer pointed out that this constituted a form of power
and discipline, a more knowledgeable other being an authority. But
it is equally true that the community of practice is the final arbiter
of who merits recognition as an expert: experts are recognized because they attract dedicated disciples. One renowned mestre with
whom I worked closely, for example, lost a great deal of influence
when his most proficient students abandoned him because of his
aggression and public criticism of them.
4 In contrast, where university-based physical education programs
influenced pedagogy, leading was often the first stage of instruction, followed by reflecting when students gained basic familiarity.
This order also suggests that leading is more intensive and remedial, and reflecting is part of the fading trajectory of assistance.
In physical educationinfluenced settings, capoeira instructors often began with the most basic instruction, whereas senior or more
traditional teachers only grudgingly offered remedial modeling,
preferring to assume student competency. In mass classes, veteran
students often stood in the front ranks, nearest the instructor; that
way, less experienced students had both the reflecting model of the
instructor and leading models provided by veterans to the front of
the room.
5 Mirror neurons, first discovered in macaques, create an overlap
between perception of motion and execution of action, directly
matching observed action to inchoate sensations of acting (see
Gallese 2003; Jeannerod 1994). Gallese and colleagues, in a review of research on neural mirror properties, conclude that in
our brain, there are neural mechanisms (mirror mechanisms) that
allow us to directly understand the meaning of the actions and
emotions of others by internally replicating (simulating) them
without any explicit reflective mediation. Conceptual reasoning
is not necessary for this understanding (2004:396). The literature on mirror neurons is vast; for overviews, see especially Gallese
(2005), Iacoboni (2005), Iacoboni et al. (1999), and Rizzolatti and
Craighero (2004). The discovery of mirror neurons lends support to
older theories of ideomotor, or sympathetic motion perception,
in psychology (James 1890; see also Jeannerod 1994; Prinz 1997)
and phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1962).
6 See Miller (1956) on the concept of information chunking. The
term is applied here to increments of motor activity.
7 Capoeira pedagogy also includes forms of instruction other than
scaffolded imitation; for example, to use Claudia Strausss (1984)
classification, contemporary capoeira instruction makes extensive
use of attention-directing and rehearsal strategies. See Bliss and
colleagues (1996:42) on variation in forms of scaffolding.
8 This attempt to better understand enculturation is, in part, a response to Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinns (1997:246) argument

212

American Anthropologist Vol. 110, No. 2 June 2008

that enculturation processes should be more carefully studied by

anthropologists (see also LeVine 1999).

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