What is Mosuo culture?
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 are the features of Mosuo culture?
The Mosuo community brims with unique traditions, among them the practice of tracing family lineage through the female side; an embrace of “walking marriages,” which holds love above all else; and persisting in the use of time-honoured techniques to weave their scarves and other handicrafts.
For what are the Mosuo known?
The Mosuo people are known as the ‘Kingdom of Women’ because the Na are a matrilineal society: heterosexual activity occurs only by mutual consent and mostly through the custom of the secret nocturnal ‘visit’; men and women are free to have multiple partners, and to initiate or break off relationships when they please.
Where do the Mosuo people live?
For nearly 2,000 years, the Mosuo (pronounced MWO-swo) have lived in the Yunnan and Sechuan provinces of southwest China, practicing matriarchal traditions. One of China’s 56 designated ethnic minorities, the Mosuo population of 56,000 people is tiny compared with China’s overall population of 1.3 billion.
What is the Mosuo walking marriage?
The Mosuo are best known for their tradition of zouhun, or walking marriage, in which youths who have gone through a coming of age ceremony at the age of 13 are permitted to choose their own axia, or relationship.
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 is walking Marriage among the Mosuo?
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 is a walking marriage and how does it work?
Their complex social structure is said to be one of the last semi-matriarchal societies in the world, following a maternal bloodline and the practice of “walking marriage.” Women may choose and change partners as they wish, a structure that favors female agency over male dependence.
What language does the Mosuo speak?
Naxi
The Mosuo speak Na (a.k.a. Narua), a Naish language (closely related to Naxi), a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
