| This is an ethnographic study of the Moso living around Lugu Lake on the Yunnan-Sichuan border in Southwest China. Their cultural center is situated in the Yongning basin, where the intensive field work of this project was conducted between 1987 and 1989. The most conspicuous feature of the Moso is a visiting relationship called tisese. For such a relationship, the only prerequisite is a mutual agreement between the man and the woman to allow sexual access to each other. The two partners work and eat in their own matrilineal households. The man visits the woman, stays with her over night, and goes back to his own household the next morning. In principle, the relationship does not affect the partners' socioeconomic status and does not commit them to an exclusive or enduring union. Among the Moso, women rather than men are situated in the cultural central locus. They uphold household harmony as the highest cultural value, and believe the duolocal visiting system and matrilineal grand household are the best forms of social organization to achieve and maintain this goal.; The Han Chinese have long been attempting to convert the Moso visiting relationships into formal marriage, but they have never truly succeeded. For the Moso, their unique visiting relationship, the ideal of household harmony underlying it, and their distinctive conception of gender became potent symbols of ethnic identity and of resistance to Han Chinese domination.; This work are mainly based on participant observation, personal interviews, and a comprehensive household survey of all the 127 Moso households in 4 villages in the Yongning basin. Additional sources include government statistics, historical records, and Chinese ethnographies. Through descriptive, linguistic, and historical analyses, this work shows that the superior status of women among the Moso is based on a combination of duolocality, matriliny, and a grand household system. It also disproves the universal concepts of marriage, nuclear family, and male authority over female. |
