A maloca is an ancestral long house

Long house

A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building built by peoples in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe and North America....

 used by the natives of the Amazon

Amazon Basin

The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries that drains an area of about , or roughly 40 percent of South America. The basin is located in the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela...

, notably in Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

 and Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

. Each community has a maloca with its own unique characteristics. For many years, these long houses were Jesuit missionaries’ objects of attack. Several families with patrilineal

Patrilineality

Patrilineality is a system in which one belongs to one's father's lineage. It generally involves the inheritance of property, names or titles through the male line as well....

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

Tribal chief

A tribal chief is the leader of a tribal society or chiefdom. Tribal societies with social stratification under a single leader emerged in the Neolithic period out of earlier tribal structures with little stratification, and they remained prevalent throughout the Iron Age.In the case of ...

 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.

See also

• Maloca is also a synonym for malón
  Malón
  Malón or maloca was a military raiding tactic of the Mapuche peoples from the 17th to the 19th centuries.The "maloca" among the Mapuche is described as a means of obtaining justice, by Juan Ignacio Molina:...
  
  , a Mapuche
  Mapuche
  The Mapuche are a group of indigenous inhabitants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. They constitute a wide-ranging ethnicity composed of various groups who shared a common social, religious and economic structure, as well as a common linguistic heritage. Their influence extended...
  
  raid.

• | La Maloca de los Sabedores de Oscar Freire