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The following description of the Ye´kuana village is taken from the text by the anthropologist Nelly Arvello-Jimenez (1983), who researched among the group in Venezuela:

A clearing in the middle of the forest indicates the presence of a village. This area is made up by zones arranged in concentric circles, with the communal house – or maloca - at the center, which has a rounded base and cone-shaped roof. It has the capacity to provide shelter for about 60 people, and it is also divided into internal circular sections: a) annaca: where the communal meals are made, visits are received and festivals held; at night, it becomes a sleeping-room for the single young men; b) äsa: a space around the annaca divided into compartments the dividing walls of which do not reach the ceiling; each compartment shelters an extended family.

Surrounding the house there is a space called jöroro, used as a meeting place for the women and which can also be used for festivals, as an alternative to the annaca. Following the spatial organization of the village, there are the work houses, there being one per extended family. These are small houses, rectangular, with no walls, and with a roof of two slopes. There the women scrape manioc, cook, sew and make scrapers, and the men work on artwork, fix their hunting and fishing tools, etc.

Finally, surrounding the work houses there are small gardens – one for each extended family – where they cultivate tobacco, cotton, sugarcane and medicinal plants. These gardens mark the end of the clearing. At distances which can be crossed on foot, one can see other clearings that correspond to gardens.

Different from this traditional pattern described by Arvello-Jimenez, the community of Auaris no longer has this communal house, although a house for meetings and festivals was built in the center of the village.

Marriage and descent

The Ye´kuana, like many indigenous groups of the Amazonian region, believe that every sexual relation contributes to the formation of a child, which is the result of a series of sexual acts. Semen accumulates gradually in the uterus of the woman, and all men who contributed to this process are considered fathers of the children.

Both the mother and the fathers observe a series of pre- and post-natal restrictions. Before birth, most of the restrictions have to be observed by the future mother, while after birth, most taboos apply to the fathers.

The Ye´kuana practice polygyny – that is, a man can have more than one wife –, preference being given to sororal polygyny – in which a man is married to several sisters. The existence of available women in the village poses limits to polygyny, such that the only men who are invariably polygynous are the shamans.

Preferential marriage among the Ye´kuana occurs between cross-cousins (in which Ego marries the mother’s brother’s daughter or father’s sister’s son). Marriages are prohibited between classificatory siblings (children of the same parents or parallel cousins) and next-generation kin. After marriage, the man goes to live in the house of his wife (or in the compartment of the house) and must be subservient to his wife’s father.

The villages are divided into two types of residential units: one which consists of those who share a single compartment in the house and can be considered an “incipient extended family” – generally comprised of father, mother, single sons, single daughters, married daughters and grandchildren – and one which is produced by a set of these compartments, that is, in which all the inhabitants of the roundhouse who can be considered a “mature extended family”.

Political organization

The village consists of a politically autonomous community. The chief of the village is the coordinator of collective activities and representative of the group to the world outside. But he does not have powers to give arbitrary orders, so his actions have to be exemplary and reflect the decisions made collectively in the circle of the elders. His position is different above all because he combines knowledge, technical efficiency, ritual wealth and the organizational capacity to orchestrate social relations.

Within Ye´kuana communities there is a hierarchical organization which is still highly respected, where the elders and especially the chiefs are always consulted in matters of collective decisions. Thus, the circle of the elders has to answer to a consultative counsel the members of which generally are heads of the “extended families” which occupy the apartments of the roundhouse, the chief of the village and families connected to the village, as well as heads of nuclear families or independent composite families .

Subordinate to the circle of the elders, there is the circle of the young men, comprised of married and single young men. Both groups get together at least once a day during the communal meal. The young men and the elders eat in the annaca in separate circles, but there is no strict separation in the composition of these circles during the meals. After eating, they discuss whatever question that may be of interest. Conversations to plan collective work parties are frequent after the morning or evening meals, while the conversations between the chief and his aide generally occur at dawn or before the evening meal.

There are even leaders of commercial trips and hunting expeditions, duties which are not fixed. Finally, ritual specialists have notable political influence and social position : shamans (jöwai) and singers (aremi or a´churi edamo). In any case, those who have the most collective knowledge are the elders and shamans, those who really know by memory the names of people and their journeys on this earth and in other cosmic spaces.

Relations among neighbors

The relation among the Ye’kuana and Sanumá (Yanomami) has been marked by wars, but it was followed by a period of coming together which lasts up to the present day (Ramos 1980; 1990). A period of coming together which has involved exchanges of knowledge and techniques, that have to do above all with food and probably also with medicinal plants, food production, and including peaceful co-existence and even marriage between the two groups.

In Brazil, although there are marriages with Sanumá women, the group continues to follow the ways of their distinct social organization, in which the Ye’kuana men who marry with Sanumá women leave their communities to live in the communities of their wives. The fact that today the Sanumá are a majority around Auaris has not changed the marks of differences. Each group upholds its own festivals, rituals, schools, teachers,, microscopists, and beliefs. Even in the field of traditional knowledge, there are many exchanges which take place, and the specializations of each group are respected, as for example that the Sanumá are better in traditional hunting. The traditional techniques of the Ye’kuana for building houses are also respected by the Sanumá.

There is a certain rivalry and reciprocal admiration between the two groups which occurs in the following way: due to their social organization , the Ye’kuana have succeeded in undertaking community projects and producing large gardens, building large houses, and a support house in Boa Vista, they have been able to gain access to salaried work sooner, or in other words, they “know how to deal with the world of the whites”; while the Sanumá supposedly spend more time in hunting, and on trips, or in other words: “the Whites take care of them”. In short, it is a world full of contradictions, that recalls the past of wars that took place between the two groups in this territory.