A maloca is an ancestral long house used by indigenous people of the

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

, notably in Colombia and Brazil. Each community has a maloca with its own unique 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 inheritan ...

relations live together in a maloca, distributed around the long house in different compartments. In general, the

chief Chief may refer to: Title or rank Military and law enforcement * Chief master sergeant, the ninth, and highest, enlisted rank in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force * Chief of police, the head of a police department * Chief of the bo ...

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 furnace. 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, for men and for women. Married men and women sleep together, and unmarried men sleep separately, as do unmarried women. A maloca is traditionally surrounded with two gardens: the inner called the kitchen gardens (growing plants such as bananas, papaya, mango and pineapple) and the manioc gardens growing manioc (yuca).

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La Maloca de los Sabedores
de Oscar Freire Huts Indigenous culture of the Amazon Indigenous culture in Brazil Indigenous architecture of the Americas {{anthropology-stub

See also

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