Because the Moso arrange sexual relations as men’s visits to their lovers’ houses, the custom is sometimes called visiting marriage, or also walking marriage. The latter, which is the term preferred by Chinese anthropologists, is derived from the Moso’s own terminology, who refer to sexual relationships as
sese,
meaning “walking.” By any stretch of the imagination, however,
sese
are not marriages.
Sese
are of two types — they are entirely private and usually short-lived, or they are more stable and publicly acknowledged, but all
sese
are of the visiting kind, and none involves the exchange of vows, property, the care of children, or expectations of fidelity. Now of course, even among the Moso, people are not entirely immune from jealousy or heartbreak, but Moso moral codes strongly discourage public displays of jealousy or amorous despair, or for that matter any display of negative emotion. Jilted lovers may receive sympathy from neighbors and friends up to a point, but they will lose face and ensure that sympathy shifts to the faithless party if they cannot keep their feelings under control. Ideally, there should be nothing, aside from desire and mutual affection, to decide on the freedom and frequency of sexual relations. Indeed, when Chinese officials first encountered the Moso in the 1950s, they were flabbergasted by their relationships, both because of the sheer number of partners women and men claimed to have had and because of the complete lack of self-consciousness people exhibited.
Seen from the Moso perspective, however, free visiting relationships strengthen and support the stability of the family. Because sexual relationships are assumed to be limited in time, because they take place outside working hours, and because they do not engage partners economically, love affairs don’t intrude on the family’s economic life or compete with the brother-sister and mother-children bonds that are at the effective core of the family.
The economic organization of Moso society, for its part, reflects these same sexual patterns. In the simplest terms, women’s work centers on the house, while men’s takes place outside. Thus, women grow, cook, and distribute the food, while their male relatives engage in all other outside activities, such as house building, herding animals, trade, and so forth, and bring home whatever cash they make in the outside world. In the same vein, women and men are responsible for different religious spheres, with women taking care of daily libations to the house gods and ancestors, while men are engaged in organized religion — Tibetan Buddhism, or where it still exists, the Daba tradition. Having said as much, I must also point out that while these divisions of labor are prevalent, gender boundaries are easily crossed when circumstances require it, and as schooling and the cash economy make headway into Moso society, women’s roles are also changing. Today both women and men are involved in work activities connected with the local tourist industry, and although it may not be a first choice, daughters as well as sons will travel to the cities to earn badly needed cash.
The relative positions of men and women in Moso society are not easily gauged. Moso social etiquette clearly stresses the importance of age over gender and thus demands universal deference toward older persons irrespective of sex. But even a senior woman who is Dabu (household head) does not have undue authority over her relatives. In ideal terms, Moso families are democratic units where all relatives expect to be included in decision making. From another angle, Moso divisions of labor and religion conform to the general rule of segregation between women and their brothers and may be perceived to create complementary rather than hierarchical roles. Males and females have separate spheres of responsibility and they also have limited authority over each other. Thus, maternal uncles are supposed to be knowledgeable and wise in the affairs of the outside world, and mothers and sisters are supposed to know best how to run the household. And these roles are not better or worse, they just are. From an outside perspective, however, it is difficult not to notice that male occupations are highly valued, that women shoulder a far greater burden of physical labor than men, and that men command respect and authority and more, because of the aura of knowledge they carry with them from their activities in the outside world.
What is beyond argument, in any case, is that Moso society is not ruled by women as is invariably publicized by the mass media. Before the Communist revolution, the Moso were governed by male chiefs who inherited their position from their fathers and passed it to their sons, while aristocratic women could and did hold high offices but not because they were women so much as because they were aristocrats. Today, although there are no rules barring women from office, the administration is dominated almost exclusively by male cadres. Unlike women, who are constantly preoccupied with housework and farmwork, men are available to pursue positions in the outside world, to become village chiefs, administrators, cadres, technicians, teachers, traders, and so forth, and in all evidence, they have a fair share of authority in public and family life. Of course, in the Moso family, the maternal bond determines blood ties, but this makes Moso society matrilineal, not matriarchal.
But if Moso society is not matriarchal, it is nonetheless remarkable. In many societies, even patriarchal ones, women are often more powerful than social convention would have anyone believe. As these expressions go, women may get to rule the roost or to be the power behind the throne; in other words, they may usurp the authority that is ideally vested in men. But Moso women do no such thing. They are
legitimate
figures of family authority, managers of family wealth, coowners of family property, caretakers of ancestors, and owners of their own bloodlines. Not least, they have personal rights and freedoms in the domain of sexual relations that are unthinkable in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, above and beyond gender relations, Moso society is extraordinary for its institution of visiting relationships, which may well claim to have solved a universal conundrum of human existence, predicated by the desire for sex and love, and the requirements of family continuity and economics.
As French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown, marriage is a mechanism through which bloodlines, family names, wealth, and other forms of privilege and social status are actuated and legitimized. Marriage, in other words, is the glue that holds societies together.
But in most societies, for marriage to work, something usually has to give. In patrilineal male-dominated societies, that something is very often romantic love, and almost always (female) sexual freedom and pleasure. In more extreme cases, male lineages may well depend on the exclusive sexual cooperation of wives and daughters, a thing that women are not naturally inclined to provide. Such societies have to work hard to keep women’s sexuality in check, and they often take drastic measures to achieve this goal, among the most infamous, female circumcision, bound feet, widow burning, burkas, and all forms of social seclusion.
On the other hand, where marriage is based on ideals of romantic love, sexual compatibility, and the equality of two individuals rather than concerns for family lines and property, it is the economic stability and the very unity of the family that risk coming unraveled. As our current divorce rates testify, love and sex provide a lofty ideal and a tenuous basis on which to build enduring marriages.
The Moso have made an extraordinary cultural choice — they have sacrificed neither sexual freedom nor romantic love nor economic security nor the continuity of their blood-lines. Instead, they have discarded marriage. What they have gained is a society where all the essentials of existence (food, affection, property, and family lines) are birthrights established by the most evident fact that is the maternal tie. And interestingly, from the perspective of family continuity, not only women but men find fulfillment in this way of life, which frees them from the anxiety of ensuring descendants — with multiple sisters, Moso families are almost guaranteed a next generation.
The Moso advocate this idealized maternal way of life as the best possible, and the most likely to foster happiness and harmony. Visiting relationships, they say, keep relations between men and women pure and joyful, and people who live in large maternal houses do not fight like married people do. We can trust that they are speaking from experience, because many Moso have tried marriage, under pressure from the Communist authorities, and most gave up. Unfortunately, the Moso can articulate the positive attributes of their family system with so much conviction because they have had a few decades to reflect on its benefits. For whatever advantage may be perceived in their tradition, the Communists failed to see. Instead, they judged Moso custom feudal and incompatible with socialist ideals.
There is no doubt that the Moso feudal rulers encouraged both the matrilineal family system and the custom of visiting relationships. For a start, the large maternal households were found in the feudal center rather than in the peripheral mountains of Labei, and indeed, closer to the feudal center, not only the Moso but also the Pumi were matrilineal. Here, all classes of Moso engaged in visiting relationships, and apart from the ruling family itself, almost all Moso, including aristocrats, traced descent matrilineally. But the feudal lords nurtured local custom in numerous other ways — through proverbs and songs extolling the virtues of the indivisible matrilineal family; through the sponsorship of communal cults dedicated to the mountain goddess and other mother figures; through the taxation and corvée system, which levied households rather than individuals and thus encouraged families to stay together.
On the other hand, the fact that men engaged in long-distance trade, and therefore could be away from home for months at a time, no doubt encouraged sexual infidelity and made sense of leaving the running of farm- and housework to women. And finally, if Buddhism did not contribute to the system, it was certainly well adapted to it. In the old feudal world, every Moso family, whatever class it belonged to (aristocrat, commoner, or serf ), was required to give up one son to study the Buddhist scriptures. It is estimated that in 1956, at the time of the Communist takeover, one-fifth of Moso males were monks vowed to celibacy but, as Joseph Rock had observed, not chastity. Evidently, visiting relationships were well suited to Buddhist Yongning.
But to claim that the feudal system nurtured Moso culture does not in any way explain the origins of Moso customs or why the Moso should be alone among all their neighbors to have institutionalized the matrilineal family and the absence of marriage. In other words, it does not answer to the questions of where the Moso come from and how old their matrilineal system might be.
Although the name Moso appears in ancient Chinese records as early as the seventh century A.D., the Moso’s ancestral origins, their extraordinary family system, and not least, their historical relationship with neighboring Naxi remain steeped in mystery. In truth, the historical record is very incomplete and at times filled with so many obscure or contradictory details that it seems indecipherable. But perhaps even more problematic is the fact that neither the Moso nor the Naxi appear to have traditional claims to this ancient name Moso. Today the Naxi take offense at it, and the Moso request it as their own in order to distinguish themselves from the Naxi.
Moso
is never mentioned in the old Naxi pictographic manuscripts, or in any of the Moso legends and ceremonial texts. The Naxi and Moso respectively call themselves Naxi and Nari in a similar vein to their Yi neighbors, whose own name is Nosu —
na
and
no
both meaning “black,” while
xi, ri,
and
su
mean “people.” As to the name black, it is almost certainly derived from an ancient tribal system that for centuries divided the various peoples of southwest China as Black and White tribes.
Putting aside the old name Moso, however, the historical record, oral tradition, and linguistic analysis all suggest that the Naxi and the Moso trace their origins neither to a single “Moso” tribe nor to two distinct tribes but to several people who arrived in Yunnan under different circumstances and at different times — Qiang, Tibetans, and Mongols, as well as ancient indigenous tribes. For, quite aside from being subjected to invasions by outsiders, the native people of Yunnan were at war for centuries, engaged in conquest, feuding, raiding, dispersal, intermarriage, and regrouping under the banner of various federations, kingdoms, and empires. Not surprisingly, the historical record mentions dozens of tribes whose names have now entirely disappeared. When groups were conquered, they were either enslaved to provide labor and/or military service or assimilated into the system of tribute payment to local feudal lords. In fact, even as late as the sixteenth century, Chinese and local historians report that northern Yunnan was inhabited by congeries of rebellious tribes whom the local feudal lords were still trying to pacify under their respective tax and corvée systems.
By 1956, whatever their more distant past, the Moso and the Naxi were entirely different people who shared neither territory, language, religion, nor custom — even though Chinese historians had confused their identities for centuries and the Communists were about to class them as a single nationality group. And undoubtedly, whether in Yongning or Lijiang, people owed much of their cultural particularities to local elites who had exerted themselves to impose laws and customs upon previous generations.
Now, on both sides of the Yangtze, the feudal lords believed themselves to be descended from an army officer left by Kublai Khan during his conquest of China. But whatever this common claim to a distant Mongol ancestry, the family histories of the Moso and Naxi rulers are entirely distinct. Not least, the genealogy of the Lijiang chiefs shows consistent father-son successions from the Mongol conquest, while that of the Yongning chiefs makes no mention of any Mongol ancestor and shows a messy line of inheritance passing as often as not from fathers to sons, brothers to brothers, and uncles to nephews. It is only after primogeniture and patrilineal succession were mandated by Imperial edict in the eighteenth century that the names of official wives even appear in this record. In fact, the old Moso elite may look not only to the Mongols to seek their own splendid origins.