Mosuo Erotic

The Mosuo call themselves Na, and they live around Lugu Lake in the mountains where Yunnan meets Sichuan, roughly 2,700 meters up, in log-walled courtyard houses built around a grandmother's hearth room. There are something like 40,000 of them. They are not one of China's 56 recognized nationalities: Yunnan counts them as Naxi, Sichuan counts them as Mongol, and that administrative seam runs straight through a single people. Their language, Na, belongs to the small Naish group inside Sino-Tibetan, close kin to Naxi but not mutually intelligible with it, and it has never had a script of its own. What makes a Mosuo household a Mosuo household is that descent and property run through women. A house is a woman, her brothers and sisters, her children and her daughters' children, and it does not break up when people pair off. The arrangement outsiders call walking marriage is tisese in Na, roughly going back and forth: a man visits his partner at night and returns to his own mother's house in the morning. Nobody moves in, no household is dismantled, and children are raised by their mother and her brothers. A man's fathering goes to his sisters' children. Either partner can end things without property or custody trailing behind.

Two religions sit on top of each other without much strain. Gelug Tibetan Buddhism arrived centuries ago and settled in; families often send a son to a monastery, and a household shrine is ordinary furniture. Beneath it is Daba, the older practice, kept by priests who carry the whole liturgy in memory because there is nothing to read it from. Daba chants recite a household's ancestry back through its women and guide the dead along the route the ancestors came. The mountain over the lake is the goddess Gemu, and in the seventh lunar month people walk a circuit around her. At thirteen, children are given adult clothes at New Year, a skirt for girls and trousers for boys, performed at the pillars of the hearth room. None of this survived by being left alone. The Yongning chieftaincy governed the area until the 1950s, its aristocracy reckoning descent through fathers while commoners did not. Campaigns in the 1970s tried to force everyone into registered monogamous marriage by withholding grain, and failed slowly. Since the 1990s the lake has been a domestic tourist destination sold as a Kingdom of Women, which most Mosuo find tiresome: tisese has its etiquette, long partnerships are common, and the version in the brochures is not the one anyone lives.