Maloca - an ancestral house

Excerpt from the book The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

The roof of the maloca is the sky, the house posts the stone pillars and mountains that support it. The mountains, in turn, are the petrified remains of ancestral beings, the culture heroes who created the world. The smaller posts represent the descendants of the original serpent. The ridgepole is simultaneously the path of the sun, the river of the sky, the Milky Way, the artery that separates the living from the limits of the universe. The floor is the earth, and beneath it runs the river of the Underworld, the stream of death and sorrow. Thus a celestial river crosses the sky as its inverse, a chthonic path of death, traverses the underworld. Each day the sun travels the sky from east to west, and each night it returns from west to east following the river of the underworld, which is the place of the dead. The Barasana bury their elders in the floor of of the maloca, in coffins made of broken canoes. As they go about their daily lives, living within a space literally perceived as the womb of their lineage, the Indians walk above the physical remains of their ancestors. Yest inevitably, the spirits of the dead drift away, and to facilitate their departure the maloca is always built close to water. And since all rivers including the River of the Underworld, are believed to run east, each maloca must be oriented along an east-west axis, with a door at each end, one for the men and one for the women. Thus the placement of the malocas adjacent to running streams is not just a matter of convenience. It is a way of acknowledging the cycle of life and death. The water both recalls the primordial act of creation, the river journey of the anaconda and Mythical Heroes, and foreshadows the inevitable moment of decay and rebirth. 

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Its absolutely fascinating!

Wade Davis says, If Civilizations are measured, however crudely, by the scale of their monumental architecture - just as we measure the stonework of Inca, the temples of the Maya - then the maloca is proof of the stunning achievements of the ancient peoples of the Amazon. 

It is so enticing to know about these structures that are built thousands of years ago and were remarkably great in every aspect. The thought process with which these structures are built is extraordinary. Everything is full of life and embodies interesting stories. 

(A maloca is an ancestral long house used by the natives (Barasanas) of Amazon).

Srik

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people of the Jaguar

Excerpt from the book The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

Barasana see the earth as potent, the forest as being alive with spiritual beings and ancestral powers. To live off the land is to embrace both its creative and destructive potential. Human beings, plants, and animals share the same cosmic origins, and in a profound sense are seen as essentially identical, responsive to the same principles, obligated by the same duties, responsible for the collective well-being of creation. There is no separation between nature and culture. Without the forest and the rivers, humans would perish. But without people, the natural world would have no order or meaning. All would be chaos. Thus the norms that drive social behavior also define the manner in which human beings interact with the wild, the plants and animals, the multiple phenomena of the natural world, lightning and thunder, the sun and the moon, the scent of a blossom, the sour odour of death. Everything is related, everything connected, a single integrated whole. Mythology infuses land and life with meaning, encoding expectations and behaviors essential to survival in the forest, anchoring each community, every maloca, to a profound spirit of place. 

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We are all subset of nature and we cannot stay without being connected to nature. We are always connected  with nature in many more ways than we think. For the people living today in the forests, the entire natural world is saturated with meaning and cosmological significance. Every rock and waterfall embodies a story. Plants and animals are but distinct physical manifestations of the same essential significance. 

For those living in the forests, nature is god. They worship, pray and protect it. They believe if they protect nature, nature will take good care of them. Their lives are embedded in every story in the woods. 

Barasana are a group located in the Eastern part of Amazon basin. 

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature." ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Srik

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Polynesians and the natural world

Excerpt from the book The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

As in any culture, there were more mundane motivations. Inheritance of Polynesia was based on primogeniture, and the social structure was fiercely hierarchical. The only way for a second or third son, or the scion of a lowly family or clan, to achieve wealth and status was to find a new world. Ecological imperatives and crises, both natural and man-made, also drove discovery. The pollen record on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, suggests that until the arrival of Polynesians the island was densely covered in subtropical forest. By the time of European contact the landscape had been completely modified, with many local species driven to extinction  and much of the wealth of the soil exhausted. The flightless birds of New Zealand disappeared within a generation of settlement. Polynesians were fully capable of over-exploiting the natural world, and when their populations exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, they had no choice but to move on. This implied heading out to sea. 

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oh! well... the story begins.

Interesting part is that Polynesians followed oral traditions, with all knowledge stored in memory, transmitted generation to generation. They left no written records.

Srik

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sailors

Excerpt from the book The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

Imagine for a moment what these journeys entailed. The sailors traveled in open catamarans, all built with tools made from coral, stone, and human bone. Their sails were woven from pandanus, the planking sewn together with cordage spun from coconut fibre; cracks were sealed with breadfruit sap and resins. Exposed to the elements, the sun by day, the cold wind by night, with hunger and thirst as constant companions, these people crossed thousands of kilometers of ocean, discovering hundreds of new lands, some the size of small continents, others mere island atolls less than a kilometer in diameter with no landmarks higher than a coconut tree.

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I wonder what drove them for such discoveries? Why did they go? Why would anyone risk his or her life to leave their place and head into a void? 

I guess they liked doing that. They were in flow. Prestige, curiosity, a spirit of adventure and many such! 

Srik 

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pursuit of man

Excerpt from the book The Wayfinders by Wade Davis

The hunt is the metaphor that brings us into the very heart of San life. A man who does not hunt remains a child. To marry, a man must bring meat to the parents of the bride. A first antelope kill is the high point of youth, a moment recorded for all time in the skin of the hunter by his father, who makes a shallow incision with bone, and rubs into the wound a compound of meat and fat, scarring the right side of the body if the kill is a buck, the left if a doe. The tattoo marks the boy with the heart of a hunter - a potent source of magic, for the San do not simply kill game. They engage in a dance with the prey, a ritual exchange that ends with the creature literally making of itself an offering, a sacrifice. Every hunt ends in exhaustion, as the antelope realizes that whatever it does it cannot escape the pursuit of man. It then stops and turns, and the arrow flies. 

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It is very interesting to read about evolution and it is even more interesting to know that San were the first people in what became the family tree of humanity. San is quite possibly the oldest culture in the world. When the rest of us decided to travel, the San elected to stay home. 

Srik

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