The new mimics? Cross-cultural learning in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

The city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil attracts considerable numbers of visitors who spend time there in order to participate in local cultural practices, particularly percussion music, capoeira and African–Brazilian dance. This paper investigates the extent of their engagement with those practices and with the wider cultural context. It was found that such participatory cross-cultural learning, adoption and travel can be split into categories and differs markedly from conventional tourism. Theorisations of cultural interaction have frequently concentrated on colonialism or migration, where acculturation is a by-product of political, economic and even military shifts. The concept of “mimicry” as used in postcolonial theory is evoked here and considered in relation to the processes studied. One of the main differences is that the subjects voluntarily expose themselves to a measure of culture shock. Furthermore, the adoption takes place against the predominant global flow of cultural influence from the “West” to the rest. Apart from certain factors which make Bahian culture accessible and attractive, motivating factors for this voluntary movement and orientation are the perception of particular aspects of that culture as “authentic other”, as well as a weakened attachment to place, specifically to Western community and cultural origins.

Keywords:

• cultural adoption
• mimicry
• globalisation
• Brazil
• mobilities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Capoeira is a rhythmic martial art carried out to music and chanting, with origins in African–Brazilian slave culture.

2. My experience of learning a new culture goes beyond this particular research, having emigrated from Germany to England with my family as a child, and coming to Wales as a student and eventually becoming a Welsh speaker and working at times through Welsh. I have therefore been in the situation both of “traditional immigrant” and of cultural traveller and adopter, both of which are discussed in this paper.

3. I did meet a Brazilian taking a dance class with me who was herself a teacher and was hired by one of the large tourist hotels in the city to run dance classes there. I would differentiate between this and visitors finding classes on their own initiative however.

4. From German Bund meaning “league”, the grammatically correct plural would be Bünde. Derived from the work of the German economist Eugen Schmalenbach (see Hetherington 1994).

5. This is not the same kind of swing as the jazz, triplet feel which is described by the same term.

6. This term is also a genre term for Bahian popular music.

7. Historical popular Brazilian instrumental music genre.

8. Folkloric genre.

9. In an interesting double flip, the Brazilian teacher of an all-female samba band in Brasilia, the capital, turned out to have first started learning to play in Manchester, UK.

10. Lazarus is appropriate here because in the Biblical story (John 11: 1-46) Lazarus of Bethany is raised from the dead by Jesus and my interviewee had recently been in a coma and been given a pessimistic diagnosis in the second of the medical emergencies mentioned.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number PM130067].