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The "owner of the village", putaki wikiti, today corresponds to the chief, and among his attributes is that of representing the local group in cerimonial interaction with other ethnic groups, orating in the center of the plaza on receiving messengers from other groups and giving counsel to the villagers to follow the models of upper Xingu ways of life. The putaki wikiti is usually chosen among the amulaw, who comprise an hereditary class of individuals of prestige, often leaders of domestic groups ("house owners"), who have special privileges in inter-village cerimonies.

The classical residence pattern of the Upper Xingu is that chiefs and individuals of prestige, such as members of the categories corresponding to the Yawalapiti amulaw, live virilocally (the woman lives in the house of her husband’s family), while the "common people" should go through an uxorilocal stage (the husband lives in the house of the wife’s father) before taking up virilocal residence. This model nonetheless is flexible, for, in the case of the amulaw of prestige, it can happen that the sons-in-law are kept definitively at their wives’ homes (thus producing a situation of permanent uxorilocality); there are also domestic groups formed by men who exchange sisters, including daughters’ husbands; and even houses comprised only by nuclear families, ocasionally with the widowed father/mother of one of the spouses.

Among the Yawalapiti, as well as among other peoples of the upper Xingu, the relations based on the sharing of physical substance, established through procreation, are important in the formation of social groups and categories. Thus, parents, children, and brothers/sisters (but not spouses) are connected throughout their lives by ties of corporal identity, and are thus affected by what occurs in each others’ bodies. Because of this identity, for example, the parents of young children and the near kin of sick people must submit to food tabus.

Children are conceived, according to the Yawalapiti, through repeated sexual activity between a man and a woman. In fact, more than one man may contribute to the formation of the child, and also be recognized as genitor.

The substance that forms the body of the child originates exclusively from the male sperm, which "cuts"or "shuts off" the blood that the women have inside their bellies; the blood then will "become round" inside the woman and form the fetus. The role of the mother is essentially to receive the semen inside her and to guarantee the pre-natal development of the child. The relations of substance between mother and child develop through feeding: what she eats feeds the child, in the same way her milk does, after birth.

Within the domestic group, relations of substance are also recognized independent of the kinship ties created through procreation, relations that are based on living and eating together; the beginning of menstruation of any woman in the house, for example, implies the destruction of all food and water present there.

(For more on the formation of the person in the upper Xingu, see the section on Social Organization on the page Xingu Indigenous Park, just avaiable in Portuguese version).