Who are the Mosuo Where do they live?
The Mosuo (Chinese: 摩梭; pinyin: Mósuō) are a small ethnic group living in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China, close to the border with Tibet. Dubbed the ‘Kingdom of Women’ by the Chinese, the Mosuo population of about 50,000 live near Lugu Lake in the Tibetan Himalayas 27°42′35.30″N 100°47′4.04″E.
What is Mosuo culture?
An ancient tribal community of Tibetan Buddhists called the Mosuo, they live in a surprisingly modern way: women are treated as equal, if not superior, to men; both have as many, or as few, sexual partners as they like, free from judgment; and extended families bring up the children and care for the elderly.
What do the Mosuo men do?
Role of men However, Mosuo men do have roles in their society. They help to bring up the children of their sisters and female cousins, build houses and are in charge of livestock and fishing, which they learn from their uncles and older male family members as soon as they are old enough.
What sets the Mosuo apart from other societies?
The Mosuo language has no words for murder, war or rape, and the Mosuo have no jails. What is a Matriarchy? Given that Mosuo women make most of the major decisions, control the household finances, and pass on the family name to their children, many anthropologists classify the Mosuo culture as a “matriarchal society.”
What language do the Mosuo speak?
Mosuo Culture: There are about 40,000 Mosuo people living in the mountains in the Lugu lake area of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. 1 They speak their own dialect of the Naxi language, but this language does not have a written system.
How are Mosuo families structured?
In traditional Mosuo families, brothers and sisters live their whole lives together in the same house. They live with their mothers, and their mothers’ brothers and sisters. Households can have three or four generations and dozens of people in one home, all of them related by blood, and none by marriage.
What religion do the Mosuo practice?
Mosuo people are Tibetan Buddhists, but they have their own internally cultivated religion called Daba. The Mosuo religion practices that combine both Tibetan Buddhism and Daba are apparent on a day-to-day basis, as well as their agrarian and bartering lifestyles.
What are 3 examples of Material culture of the Mosuo?
Three aspects of the Mosuo culture that tend to attract the most attention are their practice of a system that is similar to matriarchal systems; their practice of “walking marriages”, an alternative system whereby women can choose/change partners as they wish, and couples do not live together or get married; and their …
Why do Mosuo practice walking marriage?
Most famous among Mosuo traditions are the practice of a “walking marriage”: Women may choose and change partners as they wish, and because Mosuo children stay with their mothers’ families for life, men only visit their female partners by walking to their houses at night.
What are the typical marriage patterns for the Mosuo people and how do those patterns reflect the concept of a walking marriage?
Instead of a civil marriage, the Mosuo have “walking marriages” (“Zouhun” in Chinese), an ongoing sexual relationship based on mutual affection [3]. Men usually visit their lovers at night in the woman’s house, and return to their own maternal family in the early morning [4].
What are the disadvantages of walking marriages?
Cons of a Walking Marriage
- The biological father is not always involved in raising his child. As mentioned above, when a woman bears a child, the responsibility of childcare falls on her side of the family.
- Living in a large household can get problematic.
- The lack of a marriage contract can hinder some opportunities.
Is Mosuo a Buddhist?