Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life. / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, eBook
Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life. / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 080476199X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804761994
- Pub. Date:
- 12/07/2009
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 080476199X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780804761994
- Pub. Date:
- 12/07/2009
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life. / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804761994 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/07/2009 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Quest for Harmony
THE MOSO TRADITIONS OF SEXUAL UNION AND FAMILY LIFEBy Chuan-kang Shih
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6199-4
Chapter One
The People and Their History
The First Thorny Issue: How to Name the People
The people whose culture is to be presented in this book live in the area by Lake Lugu on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces in southwestern China. Their cultural center is Yongning of the Ninglang Yi Autonomous County in Yunnan Province. Some of the population live in other parts of Ninglang County and a considerable portion are in Muli, Yanyuan, and Yanbian Counties on the other side of the provincial border.
In fall 1987, on my first field trip, I stopped at the county seat of Ninglang to present the letter of introduction from my host institution in the provincial capital Kunming and to obtain another one from the county government. To be accepted by the local authorities and people in my field, I would need the latter to assure them that my research activities were sanctioned by the government. When I met with the county leaders, the first reaction of County Party Secretary Asu Dali, a sharp-minded Yi man in his mid-forties, was somewhat beyond my expectations. He got straight to the point without even a word of courtesy: "Naming this particular group is a very tough question to deal with." His tone was discouraging, but his concerned attitude showed that he was not trying to dispirit me. "On the one hand," he went on to explain, "the masses will be unhappy if they are not called Mosuo ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ). On the other, the superior authorities will disapprove if the group is not called Naxi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Now, you want to investigate this group and write a book. The first and biggest problem for you is what to call them."
This was not the first time I had been cautioned about the pitfalls of naming some of the minority groups in general and the group I was going to study in particular. Just a few days before, I had a conversation in Kunming with Guo Dalie of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, and he mentioned this problem as a headache for researchers of ethnic studies. After a brief pause, Secretary Asu was kind enough to share with me his way of handling this thorny issue: "In the county, we call them Mosuo ren ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) to avoid calling them either Mosuo zu ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII), which will offend the (higher level) government, or Naxi zu ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII), which will offend the masses."
As an official position of a lower-level government, that was an ingenious compromise indeed. In the People's Republic of China (PRC), zu, short for minzu, meaning "ethnic group" or "nationality," is the term applicable to the fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups. It is a legal status with great political-economic significance. This status was granted to the ethnic groups by the central government, partially based on the result of a massive investigation of ethnic identification in the 1950s, known in Chinese as minzu shibie.
Many ethnic groups who applied for but were denied the status have been classified as subgroups under some of the fifty-six unitary groups (Fei 1980; Lin 1984; Huang 1989). To some degree, the subgroup status recognizes the cultural distinctness of a group, but it is not a legal status and does not come with any privileges associated with the status of minzu. Although the fifty-six minzu officially represent the entire 1.3 billion population of the PRC, a number of subgroups claim that they should not be classified as part of a larger group because they are in their own right culturally distinct enough to be recognized as a minzu.
The people I planned to study feel this way. They are officially classified as part of the Naxi, one of the minzu, but they have strongly opposed themselves to this imposed identity. By calling them Mosuo ren, the imposed Naxi identity is removed, thus their ethnic feeling is respected. In the meantime, the government classification is not violated since the status marker zu is avoided and the term ren, meaning "people," can be customarily applied to any subgroup of a minzu.
Writing in English, fortunately, I do not have to specify whether the group under consideration is a zu or a ren. Yet the naming problem does not stop there. From an anthropological perspective, there are even more significant and interesting questions to address in a comprehensive ethnography: What name do the people call themselves? Do they want other peoples to use this name? If not, why? What are they called by other peoples? What are the cultural, historical, and political connotations and significance of the aliases? What should we, as researchers, call this group in our works?
In their native language, Naru, they call themselves Nari. They also use some other names in their language, including Na, Na-hing, and Hli-hing. Na is short for Nari. Hing means "people," thus Na-hing means "the Nari people." The names Nari, Na-hing, or Na are used interchangeably to refer to a single member of the ethnic group or the group as a whole. In contrast, Hli-hing is not a name for the ethnic group. It refers only to Naru speakers living in Hlidi, or Yongning basin, as distinguished from those living in other locations. Literally, hli means "peace" or "rest," but in the term Hli-hing it is short for Hlidi. In their language Hlidi means "peaceful land." (The Chinese name Yongning, literally meaning "everlasting peace," is a very good translation.) The name Hli-hing, therefore, literally means "the people of the peaceful land."
When they speak Chinese, as more and more of them do in recent decades, they call themselves [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Mosuo), and they prefer to be called this name by other ethnic groups. Unlike with the Naru names, the meaning and etymology of the term Mosuo are not clear. My informants could not make sense of the two syllables in their own language. They believed this name was given to them by the Han, or the Chinese speakers, but were not sure about its meaning and origin. Although this name has a long standing in Chinese literature, there is no information regarding where it is from and why it was formed as such.
Similarly pronounced variants of this name have appeared in Chinese historical records for more than a thousand years. The first of them appeared as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Mosha) in Huayangguo Zhi (Gazetteer of the Land of Huayang) by Chang Qu of the fourth century (listed as HYGZ). The same name later appeared as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Moxie) in Man Shu (Book of the Barbarians) by Fan Chuo of the ninth century (listed as MAS). From then on, more than a half-dozen variants of the name appeared in Chinese historical literature, with various combinations of the characters pronounced as Moxie, Mosha, Mosuo, or Moxi. The term was usually used indiscriminately to refer to both the Nari centered in Yongning and a larger group, now known as the Naxi, centered in Lijiang, southwest of Yongning.
Compared with the Nari, the Naxi has been a much more highly sinicized minority ethnic group since the late imperial period. Throughout history, many Naxi scholars and even chiefs held imperial degrees and wrote highly acclaimed poems and essays. The most famous modern Naxi scholar was the late Fang Guoyu of Yunnan University, a nationally renowned historian and the leading authority in the bibliography and textual examination of Yunnan historical literature.
Fang was also the most influential scholar on the etymology of the term Moxie. His theory is summarized in an article he coauthored with He Zhiwu, also a Naxi scholar, entitled "Naxizu de Yuanyuan, Qianxi he Fenbu" (The Origin, Migration and Distribution of the Naxi). Fang and He suggest that the first syllable of the name Moxie, the variant most frequently used in Chinese historical records, comes from mao in the Chinese word maoniu, meaning "yak." Because the ancestors of the Moxie made a living herding yaks, they are also known in Chinese historical literature as "maoniu Qiang." Thus, the two authors contend, the first syllable in the name Moxie is a phonetic variant of mao, short for maoniu, and describes what the group was known for. The second syllable, according to Fang and He, is from the Naxi word tso, meaning "man" or "boy." The name, therefore, means "yak herding people," with one constituent syllable from the Chinese language and the other from the Naxi language (Fang and He 1979).
With respect to Fang's highly esteemed scholarship, I must point out that this suggested etymology of the term Moxie is forced and far-fetched. In Chinese historical records, the Moxie people were indeed sometimes called maoniu Qiang ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or maoniu yi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), with maoniu meaning "yak," Qiang referring to a large conglomeration of ethnic groups in the western part of ancient China, and yi being a generic term for ethnic groups in the eastern and southwestern parts of ancient China. Thus both terms mean "yak herding people," the same meaning as Fang and He's interpretation of the term Moxie. Note, however, that in both terms all the constituent words (and syllables) are Chinese, unlike Fang and He's suggestion that the two syllables of the term Moxie come from two languages. Note also that in both terms maoniu, the word for "yak," appears in full rather than being abbreviated as in Fang and He's interpretation. Moreover, both names are descriptive and their meaning is clearly indicated by the Chinese characters, unlike the two characters in the term Moxie, which are symbols of sounds without any specific meaning and thus subject to multiple interpretations.
Before Fang and He's analysis that Moxie means "yak herding people" can be accepted, several questions must be answered. First, why is the term a mixture of the Chinese language and the Naxi language? In contemporary usage, the word for "yak" is pronounced ber in the Lijiang Naxi language and bu in the Yongning Moso language. Both are monosyllabic. If the second syllable in the term Moxie is indeed a loan from the Naxi language meaning "man," as Fang and He suggested, why would the Chinese speakers not just borrow both words and call the group something like Bertso or Butso? Why would they instead cut a disyllabic Chinese word in half and combine one half of it with a Naxi word? Second, if the first character in the term Moxie is indeed an abbreviation of the Chinese word for yak, why is it not the exact word [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (pronounced mao), but a series of variants such as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (both pronounced mo) that have nothing to do with yak? Finally, phonetically speaking, the pronunciations of both the Chinese mao and the Naxi tso are too far away from that of the term Moxie. Why do none of the Chinese variants sound closer to the supposed originals?
If Fang and He were still with us today, I am afraid they would have difficulty answering these questions and defending their proposition. By the very fact that the term Moxie has about a half-dozen variants of closely pronounced Chinese characters, my judgment is that this term, in any form, is a Chinese transliteration of a foreign word. Considering that this term is the alias of a group of people and that the forebears of the people were in direct contact with Chinese speakers when the term first appeared in Chinese literature, the original is more than likely from the native language of the group in question.
Which word or phrase in the original language, then, was the one that was transliterated into Chinese? Throughout my research, I kept a keen interest in this perplexing question. As mentioned before, my informants in both Yongning and Lijiang could not link the terms Mosuo or Moxie to any sensible word in their native languages. When pressed about the meaning of the terms, some would just offer a version of Fang and He's interpretation without knowing whom to credit. The Naxi language, spoken by the people centered in Lijiang, and the Naru language, spoken by the people centered in Yongning, are not mutually intelligible but are closely related. In order to solve the conundrum, I deliberately collected words in both languages that sound close to the Chinese variants Mosuo, Moxie, Mosha, and Moxi, and agonized over all the possible words I could think of. My efforts did not reach a conclusion until more than ten years after I started the search.
In the summer of 2001, I made another field trip to Yongning under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. While being jolted around in a Mitsubishi SUV on the way from Lijiang to Yongning, I was ruminating yet again over the candidate words from which the term Mosuo and its variants might have been transliterated. When I was mulling over the phrase mosi, the legend about the English word kangaroo suddenly occurred to me.
In the 1770s, the story goes, when Captain Cook and his explorers in Australia saw a large quadruped hopping animal they had never seen in Europe, they asked: "What is the name of this animal?" "Kangaroo," the aborigines replied. The British assumed this must be the name of the animal and introduced the word into the English vocabulary as such. It turned out, according to the legend, that the word was not the name of the animal. Rather, it meant "I don't understand."
Inspired by this legend, I wondered how I could have missed the point for so long. In both the Naxi and Naru languages, mosi means "not know," which can be used as an independent phrase to answer a question. The pronunciation of this phrase is identical in both languages. I had used this phrase in the field countless times but never thought it was the answer to my long-standing question.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Quest for Harmony by Chuan-kang Shih Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations....................ixAcknowledgments....................xi
Note on the Usage of Kinship Terms in English....................xiii
Legend of Symbols in Kinship Diagrams....................xiv
Introduction....................1
1. The People and Their History....................21
2. The Political Structure and Cultural Environment of Traditional Moso Society....................52
3. Tisese: The Primary Pattern of Institutionalized Sexual Union....................73
4. Marriage: The Secondary Pattern of Institutionalized Sexual Union....................101
5. Matrilineal Descent and Matrilineal Ideology....................132
6. The Moso Social Organization: The Domestic Group and the Descent Group....................149
7. Navigating through the Web of Social Relations....................176
8. Household Life among the Moso....................207
9. The Unusual Moso Gender System....................227
10. Religions and Rituals among the Moso....................241
Conclusion....................261
Notes....................281
Character List....................299
References....................305
Index....................319