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Business/ Education & Society // Mar 2017
As is tradition, siblings live their whole lives in the same house with their mothers, their aunts and their uncles. It is not uncommon to have four generations under one roof, all bonded by blood but never wedlock. The agrarian community has thrived for centuries, at least since the Yuan dynasty that ruled 1271-1368, living next to other ethnic groups that practised more traditional, monogamous lifestyles. The communists put a stop to their customs from the mid-20th century, but following the collapse of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, most reverted back. “In the late 1980s, the Mosuo were either very defensive or denied the existence altogether of the so-called walking marriage,” Chuan-Kang Shih, a Florida University anthropology professor tells The New York Times. “Then in the mid-1990s, when tourism began in the Lugu Lake area, they began to see it as capital to attract tourists, and they started to boast about it.” Curious tourists are attracted to these communities by their unusualness and spectacular alpine setting. Upon hearing the
stories of open relationships, some visiting men have been known to attempt to take advantage of the women, “So we have to beat them up,” says Duoji. As so often happens, though a tourism boom has helped dragged many from poverty, the construction of extra roads and an airport have taken from the peacefulness of the land. Few places outside China have evolved at such speed. There are an estimated 40,000 Mosuo around Lake Lugu, but the appetite for traditions such as the ‘walking marriage’ is waning, with more marrying outside their communities, or moving to bigger cities. There is no written Mosuo language, so likely it will eventually vanish. “The system makes so much sense when you think about the overall ways in which family systems have to navigate between sexual desire, stability, domesticity and claims for children,” a University of New York professor of sociology, Judith Stacey, tells the Times. “But it depends on a lack of mobility, which is why now, with all of this inequality as well as economic and geographic mobility, it can’t survive.”
— Words: Jamie Christian Desplaces