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Women rise at first daylight, bathe and prepare the men's communal breakfast, which usually takes place in the house of the village leader. After the meal, the men depart alone, in pairs or in larger groups, depending on the spore prints seen the day before (peccaries, for example, are good prey for collective hunt trips). After they have left, the women eat with the children and soon after go to the swiddens to harvest and replant manioc. They return close to midday and prepare manioc flour, porridges and bread. Around three in the afternoon, the men return with their game and hand the catch over to their wives. Each woman cooks at her own hearth, but the meal that follows is communal, held in the leader's house, the men eating first, followed by the women and children. After this, the three or four meals that follow until sleep (around 9 p.m.) assume an increasingly domestic and individual character. In day-to-day life, male activities have an easy-going rhythm, very often interrupted by long periods of idleness in their hammocks, while the women work hard in the swiddens, preparing the meals and collecting firewood.

However, the women are not shy in complaining about men's laziness. The latter, in turn, sometimes fight among themselves, accusing each other of greed, for failing to distribute the meagre results of the daily hunt trips generously. When the situation reaches a critical point, the domestic groups disperse to various hunting camps, occupied for a period varying between two or three days and up to a month (adding up all the periods spent by a domestic group in the camps during one year gives an average of four months per domestic group per year). Here the roles are inverted: while the men spend up to twelve hours hunting without pause, the women idle in their hammocks. Also, everyone eats together: hunters, wives and children.

In a few days at the encampments, the men will have hunted much more than their domestic groups are capable of consuming. Consequently, they may decide to return to their home village, there holding a festival, smoothing over old conflicts or provoking new ones. Or they may decide to exchange the excess game for manioc flour, ipadu (macerated coca leaves) or manioc bread, supplied by river-dwelling Indians. In this case, some domestic groups may decide to stay for some time (from a few days to a month) in the riverside village, working in the swiddens and in the construction of new houses.

The relation between the Maku of the Uaupés and their river-dwelling neighbours, who speak Tukano, is fairly hierarchicalized: the former are taken to be 'slaves' of the latter. However, this is much more an ethnic ideology than an effective social practice. The Maku are free to come and go, establishing (or breaking) 'slavery' relationships with various riverside villages at the same time. At the same time, the Maku swiddens - in general 80% less productive than the riverside swiddens and incapable of meeting the demand of the Maku themselves - are spared. In reality, the Maku accept their status of 'slaves' due to the evident advantages that this brings them: they have access to cultivated products without having to assume the consequences of the sedentarization required to achieve a level of agricultural productivity similar to the Tukano (close to ten tonnes of tubers per domestic group per year, whereas Maku production is under three tonnes).