Macumba Dance Fitness is a family of folklores. The role of a Macumba Dance Fitness certified instructor as translator/interpreter

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CHAPTER I  
 
 
1.1 The beginning of Macumba Dance Fitness in a cultural perspective 
  
 The aim of this thesis is to present an overview, through the existing literature, of 
the intersection between sport, culture, dance and language. These phenomena are all 
interrelated. The final goal is to observe Macumba Dance Fitness, a sport discipline that 
keeps growing in Italy and abroad, identifying it as a ‘mass phenomenon’, a 
regional/national/transnational subculture, through the description of its interrelationship 
with dance and music and of the linguistic and mental processes of all Macumba 
instructors during their daily work. 
 Maurizio Imperoli, also known as Max Imperoli, choreographer, dancer, holding a 
degree in Physical Education, invented Macumba Dance Fitness in 2005. His Brazilian 
heritage created the strong attraction to Latin American dances that influenced the flavor of 
Macumba. He lived and travelled extensively to Latin America to keep himself updated on 
the new emerging styles of dances. Macumba is the result of his attempt to find a perfect 
mix between sport and dancing. Or, in other words, it’s the perfect blend of wellness and 
enjoyment. Macumba is a dynamic, yet simple workout, based on cardio-fitness with some 
elements of physical resistance for body sculpting, efficient at burning calories and toning 
the body. Macumba effectively brings together slow dance moves with high impact 
aerobics. In order to be appreciated by a large audience, a pre-choreographed Macumba 
class, is characterized by several types of music and different cultures that go from African 
tribal music to the best known Latin American music (Salsa, Merengue, Bachata, Samba, 
Cha-Cha, Colombian Cumbia, Calypso) to folk music, hip-hop, dance hall, rock, reggaeton 
and the 70s, 80s, 90s. Macumba Dance Fitness is a 100% Italian method, recognized by 
CONI, the Italian National Olympic Committee (Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano) 
through a national organization of sport promotion, fostering a patriotic as well as 
multicultural sense in the world, a serious activity, where mental and emotional exchange 
of energy, is critical for whole body wellness: Mens sana in corpore sano.
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 Therefore Macumba, through a sport activity, promotes the unity of cultures. Here 
comes the first dichotomy: sport and culture. Important preamble at this point is the origin 
of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 at the University of Birmingham 
                                                           
1
 www.macumbasport.it, Official website, Press section: “In forma a ritmo di MACUMBA”, by Giorgio Mammoliti, Top Salute 
Magazine, Anno XXII N. 1, febbraio 2014.
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in Britain, the so-called founding figures, Richard Hoggart (1918-2014), Raymond 
Williams (1921-1988), Edward P. Thompson (1924-1993), and the important figure of 
Stuart Hall (1932-2014). Providing an anthropological perspective, Cultural Studies 
concentrated in those early days on the daily life experiences of the common people in 
Great Britain, the everyday life that becomes popular, including all aspects and social 
practices, from arts to traditions and sports, emphasizing all forms through which culture 
can be expressed creatively. It is interesting to see different points of view and approaches 
used by writers, authors and experts, when examining the history of the word culture and 
what is meant by cultural history.  
 Hughson argues that it seems impossible to give an exact definition of cultural 
history. For this reason he refers to Peter Burke’s work, ‘What is Cultural History’, where 
Burke proposes that “the common ground of cultural historians might be described as a 
concern with the symbolic and its interpretation.”
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 Following this hint, Hughson states that  
“focus is placed on the symbolic importance of sport to people. The meanings people in 
western countries give to engagements with sport, both as participants and spectators, 
evince a life passion not generally observable in other cultural domains.”
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 If we consider the article by Tilsen and Nylund concerning therapeutic 
conversations about popular culture, they allude to one of the world’s most prominent 
cultural critics, Raymond Williams (1981, 1983) who sees the origin of the word culture as 
being connected to “agricultural processes involved with growing crops.”
4
 In ‘Culture and 
society’, Raymond Williams writes that culture […] had meant, primarily, the tending of 
natural growth, and then, by analogy, a process of human training.[…] For what I see in 
the history of this word, in its structure of meanings, is a wide and general movement in 
thought and feeling. […] Where culture meant a state of or habit of the mind, or the body 
of intellectual and moral activities, it means now, also, a whole way of life.”
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 Only later on 
the notion of cultivation was adopted to refer to cultured people. In this we can see the 
foundation of the distinction made by Arnold (1960) between cultured and “uncultivated 
                                                           
2
  BURKE P., (2004) What is Cultural History, Cambridge: Polity, p. 3, quoted in HUGHSON J., “Cultural history and the study of 
sport”, Sport in Society, Vol. 12, No. 1,  January 2009, p. 3.  
3
 HUGHSON J., “Cultural history and the study of sport”, Sport in Society, Vol. 12, No. 1,  January 2009, p. 3.  
4
 WILLIAMS R., (1981) Culture,  (1983) Keywords, London, Fontana, quoted in TILSEN J., NYLUND D., “Cultural Studies 
Methodologies and Narrative Family Therapy: Therapeutic Conversation About Pop Culture”, Family Process, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2016, 
Family Process Institute, p. 228. 
5
 WILLIAMS R., (1972) Cultura e rivoluzione industriale, Einaudi, Torino, pp. 20-21 (my translation).
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masses.”
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 This distinction is often represented by the dichotomy high-culture and low-
culture.  
 Another important contribution is provided again by Raymond Williams who in 
‘The Long Revolution’, identifies “three general categories in the definition of culture. 
There is, first, the ‘ideal’ in which culture is a state or process of human perfection. […] 
Then, second, there is the ‘documentary’, in which culture is the body of intellectual and 
imaginative work. [...] Finally, third, there is the ‘social’ definition of culture, in which 
culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and 
values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior.”
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 Nowadays the word culture means everything and nothing because it is associated 
with processes of learning, levels of education, general knowledge that someone can have 
in different fields, expressions of shared forms of arts and so on; basically the word culture 
permeates extensively life and society affecting all or most parts of things and people. 
Indeed as Williams notes, “culture has to be considered within the real social context of 
our economic and political life […] a good living culture is various and changing, that the 
need for sport and entertainment is as real as the need for art.”
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 So sport is culture, an expression of popular culture and feeling, that for Hughson 
“like the arts, embodies values intrinsic to the lived expression”
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 of humanity. 
 My intention was to shortly examine the history of the word culture and what is 
meant by cultural history. For the latter, it is insightful as well the explanation given still 
by Williams when he says that cultural history is not confined to the descriptions of a 
specific time, but involves the experiences lived in that specific time by a group of people 
in connection to the experiences lived by others. Experiences of cultural activities that 
generate social relationships stating that “this structure of feeling is the culture of a 
period[…], it is on it that communication depends.[…] One generation may train its 
successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, 
but the new generation[…]responds in its own ways […] taking up continuities[…] yet 
feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a 
new structure of feeling.”
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 Culture therefore continuously evolves and is inherited across 
                                                           
6
 ARNOLD M., (1960) Culture and anarchy, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 6, quoted in TILSEN J., NYLUND D., 
“Cultural Studies Methodologies and Narrative Family Therapy: Therapeutic Conversation About Pop Culture”, Family Process, Vol. 
55, No. 2, 2016, Family Process Institute, p. 228. 
7
 WILLIAMS R., (1961) The Long Revolution, Chatto & Windus, London; Broadview Press, 2001, p. 57. 
8
 Id., pp. 363-364. 
9
 HUGHSON J., “Cultural history and the study of sport”, Sport in Society, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 2009, p. 4. 
10
 WILLIAMS R., (1961) The Long Revolution, Chatto & Windus, London; Broadview Press, 2001, pp. 64-65.
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generations, that is, it is “passed on through collective sensual engagement with elements 
of culture, for example, generations of familial support of a football team based in 
identification with locality.”
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 All instructors of Macumba and their students, participants to a Macumba class or 
an event, create a specific group of people, identifying themselves with the name of 
‘Macumberi’. In these 13 years, Macumba has been witnessed by two generations. There 
are several cases in Italy and abroad of instructors who have involved their friends, 
colleagues, and their family members too, mainly their kids who have become instructors 
as well; instructors of the future inheriting their past experience. Once more, cultural 
history is not about portraying an exact time, but learning in details how that exact time 
was experienced by certain groups of people. This might be a good reason to consider 
Macumba Dance Fitness a regional subculture that developed in the local area of Rome 
and from the ‘Due Ponti Sporting Club’ where it was originally experimented (still a 
favorite location of many events), spread to other regions becoming a national subculture, 
finally transforming itself into a transnational subculture going abroad to foreign countries. 
Certainly Macumba has to preserve a sense of unity of culture, fostering a sense of pride 
towards one’s culture in the world and at the same time embracing different international 
cultures that should as well promote their own identities.  
 The importance of identity is stressed in the collection of essays edited by HØlène 
Kringelbach and Jonhatan Skinner. They show the interconnection between dancing 
cultures and identity, investigated as well in anthropology. “We wouldn’t survive without 
an identity!.”
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 With this exclamation, Lüdtke expresses perfectly the need for a sense of 
identity that arouses through music and dance, highlighting how compelling is such a 
feeling in anyone’s life, at the point that it could lead to personal crisis in society, and 
bring to a detachment from one’s own natural contexts, environments and cultural 
backgrounds. Lüdtke recalls French-Libanese writer Maalouf (2000) and his definition of 
identity, based on which no one should deny his own identity, while accepting instead “that 
everyone’s identity is complex, unique and irreplaceable, that each and everyone is a 
                                                           
11
 HUGHSON J., “Cultural history and the study of sport”, Sport in Society, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 2009, p. 5. 
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 LÜDTKE K., “We’ve Got This Rhythm in Our Blood. Dancing Identities in Southern Italy”, in KRINGELBACH H., and SKINNER 
J., eds. (2012), Dancing cultures; globalization, tourism and identity in the anthropology of dance. New York: Berghahn Books,  60-74, 
p. 64.