This article offers a fresh account of the social organization of hunter-gatherers, challenging the ecological framework which has dominated hunter-gatherer studies to date. It re-visits the conversation on `band societies', which was started by Julian Steward in 1936 and nearly died out thirty years later, afte the seminal symposium Man the Hunter. It introduces indigenous voices into it, linking them not with ecological but with contemporary theoretical concerns about the diversity of sociality and about society as a concept. The article proposes that band relationships are about ways of relating to others that rest on 'we relationships' and on a 'sharing perspective'. They are expressions of sociality, the general significance of which has hitherto been largely overlooked.