Training the “Cidadão do Bem“: Embodying Citizenship in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Clubs in Rio de Janeiro

• In Event: Integration, State Policies, and Social Change in Sport

Abstract

It is generally acknowledged that in circumstances in which the poor are denied urban citizenship, sport-for-development projects offer opportunities for inclusion. However, how do disadvantaged children, youth, and adults acquire a sense of citizenship through sport? What are the sport-related practices supposed to instill into them civic values? My presentation is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork among groups of Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro for which I actively participated in Brazilian jiu-jitsu training in addition to conducting interviews and participant observation. Based on my analysis of the groups’ sporting practices, rituals, and events, I argue that the corporeal training practices are an integral component of the group’s efforts to create an alternative “warrior” citizenship. The Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners of my case study pride themselves of having a “martial ethos” consisting of hierarchy, loyalty, and discipline. In their view, status in contemporary Brazil is generally acquired through illicit means. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, on the contrary, status can only be acquired through hard and honest bodily work epitomized in the muscular body of the athlete. The Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym thus becomes a heterotopia (Foucault 1986), reflecting and inverting the normal social circumstances, where students learn to embody a specific sense of citizenship referred to as “cidadão do bem”, “the good citizen”. My paper aims to analyze the meaning this alternative citizenship acquires and to describe through which bodily techniques, rituals, and events it is realized.

Author

• Raphael Schapira, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies