The social organization of the Great Basin’s pedestrian bands reflected the rather difficult arid environment of the culture area; groups were typically small, moved frequently, and had very fluid membership. These mobile bands moved through a given territory on an annual round, exploiting the available food resources within a particular valley and its adjacent mountains. Food supplies were seldom adequate to permit groups of any size to remain together for more than a few days. People usually came together in larger groups only for certain brief periods—during rabbit drives in the spring or during the piñon nut season in the autumn. Where conditions allowed, as for the Washoe at Lake Tahoe and the Northern Paiute and Ute groups at lakes in their districts, people would also aggregate when fish were spawning. These periodic gatherings are perhaps best understood as aggregations of several extended families; they involved no sustained sense of political cohesion.

The same fluidity of social organization was characteristic of the equestrian bands. Possession of horses permitted larger numbers of people to remain together for much of the year, but this did not lead to the development of formal political hierarchies within the tribes. Among both equestrian and pedestrian groups, a particular leader was followed as long as he was successful in leading people to food or in war. If he failed, people would simply join other bands or form new ones.

Kinship and marriage

The basic social unit usually consisted of a two- or three-generation family or the nuclear families of two brothers, augmented occasionally by other individuals with ties to the core group. Kin ties were reckoned bilaterally, through both the mother and the father, and were widely extended to distant relatives. Such extension permitted people to invoke kin ties and the customs of hospitality that rested upon them in order to move from one group to another if circumstances warranted.

Marriage practices varied across the culture area, with a tendency among some groups to marry true cross-cousins (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s child) or pseudo cross-cousins (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s stepchild). Both the sororate (marriage between a widower and his dead wife’s sister) and the levirate (marriage between a widow and her dead husband’s brother) were practiced, as were their logical extensions, sororal polygyny and fraternal polyandry. Although polygynous marriages were formally recognized by communities, polyandry was usually informal, consisting only of a couple extending sexual privileges to the husband’s brother for a limited period of time.

There was no set pattern of postmarital residence. A newly married couple might live with the bride’s family for the first few years until children were born, but the availability of food supplies was the key factor in determining residence. Marriages could be brittle, especially between young adults; divorce was easy and socially acceptable. Nonetheless, the difficult environment favoured a division of labour that led most individuals to be married (whether to one person or in a series of partnerships) during most of their adult lives.

Children began to learn about and participate in the food quest while very young. Grandparents were responsible for most caregiving and for teaching children appropriate behaviour and survival skills; adults of childbearing age were engaged in providing most of the food for the group. There was little emphasis on puberty rites except among the Washoe, who held a special dance and put a girl through various tests at the time of menarche.