Representaion of Maloca

The maloca represented a person. The ridgepole was the spine and the painted house front was the face. To the Barasana it represented the whole universe. The roof was the sky. The ridgepole was the path of the sun across the heaven. The front door was ‘door of east’ and the back door ‘door of west’. There was an imaginary river under the maloca called the river of the dead. Thenthe sun set west, went upstream through the river, and rose in the east the next morning.