ARTICLE - FROM THE GYMNASTICS CENTRAL INSTITUTE (GCI) IN STOCKHOLM TO BRAZIL: CULTIVATION AND SPREADING OF AN EDUCATION OF THE BODY

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the results of a research on the Stockholm Gymnastics Central Institute and how the Swedish Gymnastics method was disseminated and cultivated. It shows how the GCI, with its training policies and strategies of action, collaborated to disseminate gymnastics in several countries. It focuses on Brazil, mainly on the different ways by which the method gained visibility: in the pedagogical thinking, in school textbooks and in the presence of Fritjof Detthow, a professor who graduated from the Institute in São Paulo. The study shows that the lingian gymnastics that arrived in Brazil must be taken as a cultural object, as a practice that does not remain pure and that, in its circulation, carries a transformative dimension. The gymnastics that Detthow brought to Brazil has deep relations with the one learned in the Institute, although it became different when in contact with a new cultural and political scenario.