Moso
The Moso, also known as the Mosuo, Na, or Naze, are a Chinese minority ethnic group living on the border of the southwestern provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. No census data of the Moso are published as they are officially classified as a subgroup of the Naxi, a large ethnic minority in China. The Moso population is estimated to be around forty thousand.
The Moso practice matrilineal descent (tracing descent through the mother's line) and have a unique visiting sexual system called tisese and grand households that usually do not consist of a husband and a wife. Women, not men, are at the center of Moso culture.
Tisese ("walking back and forth") among the Moso differs from marriage in that it is noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive. Commonly, the two partners in a tisese relationship work and consume in their own matrilineal households, respectively (or separately). The man visits the woman in the evening, stays with her overnight, and goes back to his mother's household the next morning. Children born to such a union belong to the household in which they were born, usually the mother's household. Because Moso culture has been changing rapidly in recent decades, the nonexclusive and nonobligatory features of tisese are disappearing.
Further Reading
Hua Cai. (2001) A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China. Trans. by Asti Hustvedt. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: distributed by MIT Press.
Oppitz, Michael, and Elisabeth Hsu, eds. (1998) Naxi and Moso Ethnography: Kin, Rites, Pictographs. Zurich, Switzerland: Völkerkundemuseum Zürich.
Shih, Chuan-kang. (forthcoming) Quest for Harmony: The Moso Systems of Sexual Union and Household Organization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
——. (1993) "The Yongning Moso: Sexual Union, Household Organization, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Matrilineal Duolocal Society in Southwest China." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Weng, Naiqun. (1993) "The Mother House: The Symbolism and Practice of Gender among the Naze in Southwest China." Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester.
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