Try to imagine a society in which there is no marriage. One where men and women take multiple sex partners in their teens, 20s and 30s, and never settle down with one. A society without husbands or fathers—one that has no word for father. Impossible, yes?
We assume the nuclear family—with a father, mother, and children of both—is the basic building block of society. Anything else seems unimaginable.
Anthropologist Cai Hua found something else in the Yongning area of Yunnan province, at the southwestern edge of China near the Burma border. It wasn't a new experimental society: Marco Polo made note of a people who did not mind if visitors had sex with their women, "provided the act be voluntary on the woman's part."
In A Society Without Husbands or Fathers: the Na of China, Hua, a professor of social anthropology at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Beijing, made four lengthy visits to five villages in the Yongning basin between 1985 and 1992, learning the Na language and studying kinship lines and social attitudes as best he could. (The Zone Books edition is translated by Asti Hustveldt.)
The people, who call themselves the Na, number about 30,000. They tend to be farmers of rice, wheat, corn, and oats; most households spin their own flax and brew beer. Their religion is a mixture of ancestor-worship and Tibetan Buddhism.
Genetic fathers have no recognized kinship with children, and no part in their upbringing. When Hua inquired after lines of generation, a 67-year-old Na woman told him: "No one asks that kind of question. If you hadn't mentioned it, no one would ever have even thought about it."
In procreation, the Na believe that males are waterers, like rain on seed, and females are primarily, if not solely, responsible for childbirth. Men and women take multiple sex partners. Men make furtive nocturnal visits to women’s homes and must return home before sunup, but develop no economic and usually no social bonds with their sex partners.
"An attempt to monopolize one's partner is always considered shameful and stupid," Hua writes, "and the villagers will mock it for a long time."
Incomprehensible as this might first appear, Hua explains the sense and practicality of Na mores, given their parameters. The society is matrilineal. Children belong to the mother's lignee (line of blood-related descendants of a common ancestor), and the basic relationships in a household are mother-child and brother-sister.
Siblings live and eat together all their lives, and raise whatever children the women bear. "We are closest to our mothers, our maternal uncles, and our brothers and sisters," a Na man told Hua. "To leave your mother and sisters for a wife, that would be shameful."
Article comments
1 - DrPat
Great first post, David! Welcome!
The matrilineal society was also a common choice in Amerind cultures, and has been used as a backdrop for numerous science fiction novels. (Tepper's Raising the Stones comes to mind.)
I congratulate you for digging your way through this book, which by all accounts (see the reviews on the Amazon site) is "dry, clinical and exhaustive" and intended for the specialist.
Bravo!
2 - Bog B L
That's a real different perspective. But it is primitive, like the author said only 'diversity of sexual partners' is all what you get. Nature gave humans the neo-cortex, so that we can blend emotion and reason. Also dolphins are monogamous and they don't mind. If we can do Na style below 30 years it would be a woderful compromise to this crapy society.
3 - Danny
I read this book and found it very informative and inspiring to say the least. It would seem to me that the Na have a superior system of family structuring and community. It's been around roughtly 3000 years or longer. That's more than I can say for our own Judeo-Christian marriage based societies here in the west.