That´s a very good issue: how to translate capoeira "roda" in English? Let us be back in time...Rio de Janeiro city, 1738...vendors, sailors, free men from Europe, slaves from Africa that speak Bantu or Malê languages. These African folks used to have rites of passage to their adolescents mainly fight technics to be utilized in combats. Back in Rio de Janeiro, Capoeira is a Tupi-Guarani language word (Tupi-Guarani was the official language of Brazil until 1757) used to denominate those people that utilize these mixed fight movements in conflicts.
Capoeira can also be seen as a cooking pot of body cultures, and world views, that clashed and collaborated with each other in order to survive and control parts of this urban landscape. In that way, the possible translation of this old Portuguese word "roda", which comes from the old Catalan language, can be what a careful observer would see in those colonial ports like Rio de Janeiro: not a circle but an environment, the capoeira environment. Some scholars from Brazil have thought the rodas of capoeira as "new quilombos". Quilombos were territories where slaves who escaped captivity find a community to hide and then build resistance. The biggest of these quilombos was the Quilombo dos Palmares which had 20 thousand inhabitants by 1670.
The environment word
started to be used in old English by 1603, according to Oxford Dictionary,
which comes from the old French language word "environ" which means
'circuit', 'surround', 'enclose', and 'circumstances'. but the coinage of the
term environment historically can be seen as an intersecting social, political,
economic, and agrarian changes, and a pivotal moment of transnational cultural
exchange.
Actually, there is even a better word for "roda": commons. The definition of commons represents a synthesis of the role of capoeira in Brazil: a resourceful environment where many types of "resources" can be shared like music, spirituality, physical education, dance, martial technics, gaming, historical source, sociology, and anthropology way of seeing the Brazilian society and so on.
Capoeira commons means the territory of relationships where Brazilian people can practice cultural resistance, historical memory, and freedom.
