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Among the Taurepang, just as among their Macuxi and Wapixana neighbours, we can observe a highly dispersed pattern of settlement, with villages generally located along secondary water courses. The movement of groups is intense and their knowledge of their territory is highly sophisticated. There is no geographical feature from streams to rock formations that will go unnamed.

Beyond the areas occupied by the villages there lives a veritable army of supernatural beings that fill up the adjacent spaces. This conglomeration composed of several classes of spirits, most of them malevolent, constitutes a set of mishaps that directly affects the mobility of the groups and thus the formation and breakup of villages.
The occurrence of established groups is not seen and social organization is based around bilateral kinship. The preferred marriage arrangement is between cross cousins (offspring of siblings of opposite sexes) and kinship terminology is of the Dravidian type. The domestic group (the nuclear or extended families) and the local group (the villages) are the two basic operative levels of organization. Neighbouring local groups form networks since they are linked by kinship ties and frequent contact. These organizational levels do not however imply a hierarchical political structure. On the contrary the villages are characterized above all by a strong degree of political autonomy.

In these societies there is a tendency to uxorilocal residence – the rule by which following marriage the husband takes up residence in his father-in-law’s house. This model of local group composition has as its main thread the relationships of alliance between a father-in-law leader and the men married to his daughters. The political stability of the group will depend on the nature of the relationship that unites the father-in-law and his sons-in-law. When the first grandchildren are born the decline of the village begins, culminating in the gradual return of the sons-in-law to their original families or the formation of new settlements. To this extent marriage between bilateral cross cousins brings greater stability to the local group since ruptures will rarely occur between related affines.

In any case the village is not a body that perpetuates itself over time independently of those who constitute it at any given moment. On the contrary, local groups demonstrate a relatively short cycle of existence such that the constant creation of new villages is a fundamental aspect of the social structure of these peoples. Removals, ruptures and regroupings make the villages of these peoples ‘historic events’ around which social memory is constructed. History is recounted according to a spatial record, emphasizing removals to new places or the return to old sites formerly inhabited (Rivière, 1984).