A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China

by Cai Hua, Asti Hustvedt (Translator)

The Na of China, farmers in the Himalayan region, live without the institution of marriage. Na brothers and sisters live together their entire lives, raising the women’s children. Since, like other societies, the Na respect the incest prohibition, they practice a system of furtive or conspicuous night visits during which a man goes to a woman’s home.

In addition to spending long periods of time with the Na, Cai Hua has analyzed numerous historical Chinese documents. He presents us with a lucid, fascinating monograph that shows how a society can function without fathers or husbands. In light of Na ethnography, he leads the reader toward a new reflection on the nature of marriage and family ― long the objects of circular reasoning in sociological analyses.

Since the inception of humankind’s interest in the diversity of its cultures, this is the first time an anthropologist has encountered a society whose structure differs totally from that of other societies throughout the rest of the world. This discovery is likely to provoke fundamental changes in the way we look at social life and human behavior.

Genres: Anthropology, China, Nonfiction, Sociology, Feminism, Asia, History

506 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Cai Hua is Director of the Center for Anthropological and Folkloric Studies at the Peking University.

(from https://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/cai-hua)

Reviews

[Petra in Oporto going out for a glass of port! · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the text book version of Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World. In Tibet and China there are communities which aren't strictly matriarchal but not patriarchal at all. The women have control over their own sex lives in every way, there is neither peer pressure, slut-shaming or even marriage. Marriage is less than it used to be in the West because there is no economic need to marry nor shame for having a baby outside of it I am talking the majority of us, not small pockets of religiosity or immigrants from other cultures but there is still pressure on a woman to not sleep with as many men as she pleases, but only praise for a man who does. This makes a book like this very welcome and interesting.

Women own property and they take lovers.The men remain in the women's property and the child has no father but has uncles that raise him. The mother and her brothers are the prime family unit. Actually it is the sisters and their children and their brothers. Everyone is related by blood in this family unit. I find it very interesting. I wonder if you get more or less child abuse (of any sort) in this sort of family rather than a typical one, or (common today) where the father is a step-parent and not related at all to the child?

Last time I got the book I sold it, this time I read some of it and sold it. I don't normally sell books I am reading/have read, only new ones, but the lady begged me so hard and forced her credit card into my hand, and my mind was going 'think of the rent, think of the taxes' so I sold it and it is dnf but not willingly.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelous work of research on a society (the Na, otherwise called the Moso) with fundamentally alternative traditions of family and sexual life. The study raises universal questions for our assumptions about love, marriage, and community.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is rather dry and academic, and is heavy on anthropological terminology, which made it a rather difficult read for me. The author is also an outsider, and seems to depend more heavily on male informants than would be ideal. However, it was definitely worth reading, because there seems to be very little about the Na or Mosuo people of Yunnan and Sichuan available in English.

As for the Na, they are extremely interesting because they are the only known society not to practice marriage and not to have marriage-based family units, except as a relatively recent imposition on the family of their chieftain by the Qing Dynasty. Instead, Na society is organized in matrilineal lineages that men and women remain in for life, and parentage is traced solely through gestational motherhood: fatherhood is not a concept in their society.

The author spends most of the book exploring how the Na kinship system works and its economic and social consequences, and in the conclusion argues that it is a unique society in which desire to "posses" sexual partners is suppressed rather than promoted by social pressures. This seems to support proponents of polyamory's contentions that sexual/romantic jealousy does not need to be regarded as positive.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting and engaging study on a group with somewhat different customs and practices to most others.

[Logophile (Heather) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not exactly a scintillating book, but it is packed full of info. Some Chinese people, and the Na especially, object to Hua's characterization of the culture.
The author's very conservative, patriarchal paradigm is the filter through which all the information arrives. For example, Cai Hua goes to The Land of Daughters and yet seems to quote men almost entirely.

An worth-while read, especially since the culture detailed challenges so many cherished Western ideas about how things have to be in order to work, but not an easy read.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting if incredibly academic portrait of a Chinese tribe that practices a very sexually liberated, matriarchal society.

Particularly interesting are Cai's efforts to tease out just how Chinese rule has changed the society over the centuries, trying and failing repeatedly to impose a monarchical patriarchy.

It reads like a PhD thesis, and the interviews are mostly with men, but it still presents a new and refreshing way to look at human society.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very good look at a culture most of us are unaware of in detail. It is written by an academic but in such a way persons such as myself can understand and appreciate. I never would have imagined all the nuances of the daily life of this group of people.