The Northwestern Amazon malocas: Craft now and then

Abstract

In the Northwestern Amazon, resilience in construction has been traditionally conceived as a capacity for social, climatic, and spatial adaptability. Through methods of seasonal reconstruction based on lightweight enclosures made mainly from palms, vernacular housing, or malocas, in the region have proven efficient from environmental, human comfort, and cultural perspectives. Intricately woven palms, layered to shape roofs and walls, form enclosures that repel water, insulate heat, and reflect light while embodying specific projections of the body in space as the basis of unique cosmological perspectives of spatial organization. The palm-weave is the very root of the construction ethos of Northwestern Amazon housing. In the last few decades, these complex woven enclosures have been progressively replaced with industrial panels made of materials such as galvanized steel or cement, simply because of their low economic cost and availability. The loss of the palm-weave in roof-walls is not a mere replacement but a supplantation of material culture and has profound environmental, human comfort, and social implications. In a context where resilience has been shaped cognitively and physically through a plant-based material culture of adaptability, what is the extent of a potential craft disruption? The supplantation of the palm-weave technical practice implies a loss of social engagement in a craft that has defined an understanding of belonging and inhabitation. This article addresses how the geometric, scale, and spatial characteristics originating from the distinctive palm-weave craft of the Western Amazon malocas of the Bora, Miraña, Muiname (Witoto), Murui (Witoto), Yukuna, Tikuna, and Makuna groups perform as a living entity. By questioning the differences between craft preservation vis-à-vis reclamation, the author explores the specific architectural and social characteristics that are locally valued in the inherited craft to create a path for discussing future generations of palm-weave in the Northwestern Amazon.