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The Canela live in palm thatch or mud houses, in the backlands style, built around a great circular path of approximately 300 meters in diameter, including the small yards behind each house. There is a plaza of about 75 meters in diameter in the center, and, like radii of the circumference, trails lead from the central plaza to each house. Behind most houses, there are located others of the same family, forming a second row and, at times, more distant houses begin a third row. (see photo in the section Location).

A woman - with her sisters, mother, grandmother, and daughters - lives in the village circle in an area defined in relation to the sunrise, and always in the same position in the sucessive locations to which the village is moved. Their cousins, descendants of the same ancestral woman in the female line (parallel cousins), live in adjacent houses along the circle of the village. If they are of the same generation, she treats them as "sisters". This woman calls the mothers of her "sisters", "mother", and the daughters and sons of her "sisters", "daughters" and "sons.". The arc of contiguous houses in which these women live is called a "long house" (ikhre lùù).

A woman's sons and brothers marry out of their "long house" and out of the house where their fathers, their mothers' fathers, and their fathers' fathers are from, in order to avoid incest. The sons and daughters of these men are cousins of the sons and daughters of their sisters, who stay in the house where they were born; more exactly, they are cross-cousins, since their fathers are opposite sex siblings. In this system of relations, a man or a woman calls his father's sister's son (who lives outside his "long house"), "father". In the same way, a man calls his mother's brother's son, "son". A woman calls her mother's brother's son, "nephew", and his sister, "niece". Grandmothers and grandfathers are terminologically equated to father's sisters (aunts) and mother's brothers (uncles), respectively.

Although the Apanyekrá and the Ramkokamekrá had kept up until then the same pattern of kinship terminology, at the end of the 1950s, the Apanyekrá abandoned the use of the term "father" for father's sister's son and for father's sister's daughter's son. In either case, the individuals was called "uncle" or "nephew", according to the new determining principle of relative age. Besides that, Apanyekrá kinship was less determined by "blood" (kaprôô) relations and tended to be more based on convenience or preference.

Kinship is recognized bilaterally, despite the matrilateral emphasis. There are no clans. There is only a certain number of isolated and cerimonial lineages whose function is to transmit the right to perform certain roles.

In the case of the Apanyekrá, various exceptions have been recorded to the pattern of matrilocal residence. By contrast, whatever exceptions occured among the Ramkokamekrá Canela were explained to me as being temporary.