Call, Response, and <i>Compromisso:</i> Ethical Practice in Capoeira of Backland Bahia, Brazil

Abstract In the Afro-Brazilian music-movement form capoeira, call and response saturates all interactions in live performance events ( rodas ). In addition to call-and-response song structures, music calls bodies into movement, bodies call to one another, and movements invoke responses from instrumentalists. Yet call and response does more than organize the roda. Demonstrating how antiphony organizes group sociality, the article argues that the music and movement also summon members to assume a range of responsibilities within the group and their lives. These include showing up for trainings and rodas, maintaining instruments, preparing for annual events, and teaching capoeira to younger generations in Bahia's underserved communities. Practitioners frame their ethical commitments to capoeira as compromisso, a concept that implies broad, long-term dedication. Grounding the study in my ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, I bridge Black music scholarship with ethical Africana philosophy to argue that capoeira practitioners use knowledge generated in their music-movement practice to conceive an ethics of compromisso. While the literature on Black musics across the Americas widely acknowledges call and response as a foundational musical mechanism, few ethnographic studies have delved more deeply into the social, ethical, and political potentials of antiphony. The article thus contributes to understandings of how Black music-dance practices generate ethical knowledge and practice through their sounds and movements. As capoeira's antiphony transcends the roda's space-time, it calls practitioners to assume an unending compromisso, making commitments that span generations to continually leverage capoeira's lessons to improve lives in Black communities of backland Bahia.