Marketing strategies within an African-Brazilian martial art

This paper analyzes the marketing strategies of groups that practise capoeira, a martial art of African-Brazilian origins. Group leaders seek financial and symbolic success in competitive Brazilian and international markets. Leaders use several marketing strategies to augment their prestige, student base and remuneration. They present their martial art classes as authentic African-descendant culture, a venue to maintain Brazilian traditions, and as an art of resistance against racial discrimination. We show that the marketing of capoeira, which includes the (un)intentional disguising of its product dimensions and the celebration of a lineage of ‘authentic’ mestres (masters), has its roots in the first half of the twentieth century, when the first two capoeira schools emerged in the physical culture scene of Bahia, Brazil. We interrogate the ways in which the reification of African-Brazilian culture through capoeira relies on students' psychic distance from Brazilian culture and cosmopolitan desires for cr...