A maloca is an ancestral
long house
A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. It has been built in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe, and North America.
Many were built from lumber, timber and ...
built by Indigenous people of the
Amazon
Amazon most often refers to:
* Amazon River, in South America
* Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin
* Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company
* Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
, notably in Colombia and Brazil. Each community has a single maloca with its distinct characteristics.
Several families with
patrilineal
Patrilineality, also known as the male line, the spear side or agnatic kinship, is a common kinship system in which an individual's family membership derives from and is recorded through their father's lineage. It generally involves the inheritanc ...
or
matrilineal
Matrilineality, at times called matriliny, is the tracing of kinship through the female line. It may also correlate with a social system in which people identify with their matriline, their mother's lineage, and which can involve the inheritan ...
relations live together in a maloca, distributed around the long house in different compartments. In general, the
chief of the local descent group lives in the compartment nearest to the back wall of the long house. As well, each family has its own hearth.
During festivals and in formal ceremonies, which involve dances for males, the long house space is rearranged; the centre of the long house is the most important area where the dance takes place. Each maloca has two entrances, one for men and one for women. Married men and women sleep together, and unmarried men and women sleep separately. A maloca is traditionally surrounded by two gardens: the inner called the kitchen gardens (growing plants such as bananas, papaya, mango, and pineapple) and the manioc gardens growing manioc (yuca).
See also
* ''Maloca'' is also a synonym for ''
malón
''Malón'' (from the Mapuche language, Mapudungun ''maleu,'' to inflict damage to the enemy) is the name given to plunder raids carried out by Mapuche warriors, who rode horses into Spanish, Chilean and Argentine territories from the 17th to th ...
'', a
Mapuche
The Mapuche ( , ) also known as Araucanians are a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina, including parts of Patagonia. The collective term refers to a wide-ranging e ...
raid.
*
Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos
The Jesuit Missions of Chiquitos are located in the Santa Cruz Department (Bolivia), Santa Cruz Departments of Bolivia, department in eastern Bolivia. Six of these former missions (all now secular municipalities) collectively were designated as a ...
, partly inspired by indigenous architecture
References
External links
La Maloca de los Sabedoresde Oscar Freire
Huts
Indigenous culture of the Amazon
Indigenous culture in Brazil
Indigenous architecture of the Americas
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