Cultural Resistance in Dance Anthropology: Batuko Dance and The Cape Verdean Refugees

Abstract

This article analyzes the traditional Cape Verdean dance Batuko in two different contexts. The first one is its tradition in the country as a social practice and the second one is the context of Batuko inside a refugee village in Cape Verde, called Rabelados. The village emerged within a movement of religious resistance in the 1940s, and lived for more than 70 years in total isolation, conserving and abandoning some of its most important traditions. This research combines some unpublished material from the author’s fieldwork in Cape Verde in 2015 with a theoretical analysis of Batuko trajectory and history of struggle and survival within this context of isolation and refuge.