Talk:Mosuo

Obviously some sections are too short. Please expand it.Dust429 (talk) 14:39, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

No Word for "Murder" and "Rape"

The article says: "Perhaps most telling about this particular social arrangement is that the Mosuo have no words for the concepts of murder, war, rape and jails. This social system appears to be the example of the matriarchal societies that are envisioned by Riane Eisler and many other feminist social thinkers." What is the source for the claim that they have no such words? One would think they would at least have picked up such words from the Chinese. And the idea that a society where men have little or no responsibility to care for their children is a feminist paradise strikes me as a little silly. - Nat Krause 20:53, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Seconded. I'm always very suspicious of claims that some ethnic group or another doesn't have words for certain concepts. It usually turns out to be wrong. - Haukurth 17:03, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

There was a PBS Frontline special on the Mosuo people. On the Frontline website, the statement in question is there. PBS is a reputable source, and certainly a documentary on the Mosuo people can give more insight to their culture. Simply saying that you're suspicious doesn't guarantee proof. Have you studied their language? Certainly, I am sure that they have learned of the words for murder, war, and rape from Mandarin Chinese, but Chinese languages and dialects remain strongly unique, and picking up words here and there does not generally happen. Regions and their people remain very proud and firmly rooted in their own culture, dialect/language. -- Anonymous

Add it back, then. But please attribute it carefully to its source. And I suspect a more original source than the PBS can be found. - Haukurth 22:20, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Response regarding murder/rape

Regarding the "accuracy" of a documentary, there have been numerous documentaries about the Mosuo, most of which continue to perpetuate common myths about the Mosuo. In fact, most such documentaries base the majority of their research on previous documentaries.

It is curious that you bring up the question "Have you studied their language?". Because I very highly doubt that you have. And I know that the majority of documentary producers have not. On the other hand, I have not only lived with the Mosuo, I am the founder of an organization that is working to create a written form of their language (which currently is a purely oral language), and work with anthropologists and linguists who do detailed study of the language. As I have said elsewhere, it is technically true that there are no words for "rape" or "murder" in their language; but they have other words that are used for that meaning (such as using "kill" to cover both accidental and intentional killing). And any attempt to draw the conclusion that the lack of such specific words indicates a lack of murder or rape is ludicrous, as the Mosuo themselves will readily attest. I regret that I lack solid documentation of this, as by far the majority of my own information comes from speaking with the Mosuo themselves. However, you can feel free to check out our organization's website, Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association, which has extensive information about the Mosuo that has all been provided and approved by Mosuo academics (including Lamu Gatusa, the leading authority on Mosuo history/culture, and a prominent Mosuo leader). I don't object to including information about the lack of particular words in their language; only with the common conclusion that this is an indication or proof that such things don't happen in Mosuo culture. --- John Lombard

This may be from "A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China" (ISBN: 1890951129) By Cai Hua. ('Na' is what he says the mosuo self-identify as). When I find my copy, I'll have a look.

It's almost always significant to find a society without words that are commonly found in other societies. Murder and rape may not be unknown to the Mosuo now, but my guess is that at some point in the past they were. Athana 22:07, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I forget how to add a separate section in the discussion section, and my comment is on religion. I added this very significant phrase to the religion section: ".... based on animistic principles and involves ancestor worship and the worship of a mother goddess: "The Mosuo are alone among their neighbors to have a guardian mother goddess rather than a patron warrior god" (Mathieu, 2003)." Cai Hua, too, discusses the Na mother goddess in several places in his giant ethnographical treatise, so let's not leave her out, here! Athana 22:21, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

BTW, John, thanks for doing this. I think that overall it's very good. Athana 22:24, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

fishermen

Under the lifestyle section, shouldn't "fishermen" be replaced with fishers?

Clean-up

My apologies that the original entries I made were not entirely up to Wikipedia editing standards; it is my first time to make a major entry like this, and I was unfamiliar with what is required. I have edited it further to make it more readable, and hope that it is found to be suitable. If there are further changes required, please let me know. -- John Lombard

Alternate names (Nuerguo 女儿国 / Nuguo 女国 / "Women's Country")

I remember reading about the Mosuo culture, but had only heard about it under the name of 女儿国 or "Women's Country" or "Girl's Country". It seems they are somewhat common terms for Lake Lugu (Google search for '女儿国 lugu'), should it be mentioned in the article? --Lost-theory 14:26, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Political power in the hands of men

Since the Mosuo culture is often pointed to as an example of a matriarchy or at least matrifocal and the political position of men is often seen as a rebuttal to this, could we get a description of the political system in Musuo culture? How it is operated, what role to those not in the system have to play, the possibility of women exerting control outside of the system in an indirect way, etc. etc. --Wolfrider (talk) 19:44, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, please, because there seems to be a lot of bs-ing in the matriarchy section, with no citations to back it up —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.13.130.18 (talk) 03:21, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

"Myths and Misperceptions" Section

I'm kind of new to the wikipedia editing thing, but I noticed that the whole Myths and Misperceptions thing is taken from this: http://www.mosuoproject.org/myths.htm page. It should probably be sourced, I'd think, but I'm not sure what the proper way to do it is so I didn't want to go in and mess it up.  :-) Rabbittime (talk) 15:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the source that the entry provides in the "Myths" section is false. In fact, the source that the myth section provides does suggest that Musuo women are "promiscuous" if by that is meant having "50" or more sexual partners in a life time, and having multiple sexual partners at any given time, and having no formal commitment to being sexually faithful to one person. Given that the source provided (http://staff.washington.edu/tamiblu/Na/myths.pdf) actually states the opposite of what is provided in the section, I am going to change it to reflect what is actually in the source once I figure out how. I am new as well. The musuoproject.org site provides no sources itself, and I couldn't find where they got their information from (for example, a particular anthropologist). Standupcat (talk) 17:32, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you to John Lombard and others

Some time ago I was scratching around for reliable sources on the Mosuo, sadly for the same reason many people do -- is this the Shangri La of feminism?

The great thing about researching evidence in cultural anthropology is "picking up" the genuine human involvement between ethnographers and the people they study. People are interesting for themselves and what they teach us about our human family. Over and over again my academic and political issues are stripped away as informative and insightful prose takes me into wonderful worlds of other people and their issues.

As a sometime linguist, the Mosuo's script fascinates me. It is impressive that they (or the Na) seem to have developed an independent form of their own.

Although there seems to be a speculative element to some historical projections of the Mosuo, it may be that their current, unique social structure has elements derived from two substantial tragedies -- a genocide of their ruling class and the economic redundancy of occupations men used to engage in for the benefit of their society. If these things are true, it seems to me our first thought ought to be one of grief and concern, not one of what does this mean for the "battle of the sexes".

I do hope western tourism does not undermine the Mosuo adapting and growing their culture in ways that they believe serve their best interests. From what John has said, I have every confidence in his organization that they minimize interference, maximize aid, and represent a positive human inter-cultural exchange, like many in history.

Best wishes for your organization and for our cousins the Mosuo. I look forward to them contributing at Wikipedia some day.Alastair Haines (talk) 05:04, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Matrilineality article

First (see my Edit summary), I replaced a sentence which had been inserted in the Mosuo article's "Matriarchy" section earlier this year without giving its source. The source for my version of the sentence was simply a sentence in the article's "Walking marriages" section -- the sentence's content belongs in both sections, rephrased of course.

I came here from the Matrilineality article and have enjoyed this Mosuo article. It is very unusual, for sure, and appears to be both reliable and uptodate (at least as of 2006, the date on the article's source webpage, www.mosuoproject.org ). I judge that I can respect the opinions of John Lombard and Alastair Haines, above, whose opinions match mine, I believe. I don't see how any encyclopedia can have a better reference source than the above webpage, evidently due to Lamu Gatusa in 2006, on top of Cai Hua (2001) and Christine Mathieu (2003).

The group behind the website, Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Assoc'n, welcomes us to come and see their popular matrilineal culture for ourselves (eating and staying at their places of business, clearly), and they say Chinese tourists do so too. I just hope they succeed at making a living by portraying themselves, essentially, and serving those who wish to visit them and their culture. Namely, I am very glad there is at least one culture in the world where matrilineal surnames can stay alive and well, as well as well-documented. Well, that's why I came here from the Matrilineality article (currently tagged for not being well-documented), to see whether the latter article's information from the Mosuo article is well-documented (a judgment I feel qualified to make because of my academic research background). I vote a strong "Yes it is".

Finally, I would rate the Mosuo article quality with a class A, but could not find the "class parameter" mentioned in the following sentence: "Revisions of assessment ratings are done by assigning an appropriate value via the class parameter in the WikiProject Ethnic groups project banner." Not that I claim to be qualified to rate article quality; I do like the Mosuo article. For7thGen (talk) 07:40, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Benefits

Isn't stating benefits a little subjective? Especially stating that there is no preference to male or female offspring. If there are no female offspring in the Mosuo household, wouldn't that end that families line? To me that would seem to cause a bit of a gender preference to offspring and to adoption in the case of no female offspring. Nadav Hirsch (talk) 21:26, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Possible Vandalism?

It has been theorized that the matriarchal system of the lower classes may have been enforced by the higher classes as a way of preventing threats to their own power.[citation needed] Since leadership was hereditary, and determined through the male family line, it virtually eliminated potential threats to leadership by having the peasant class trace their lineage through the female line. Therefore, attempts to depict the Mosuo culture as some sort of idealized “matriarchal” culture in which women have all the rights, and where everyone has much more freedom, are based on faulty evidence; the truth is that for much of their history, the Mosuo peasant class were subjugated and sometimes treated as little better than slaves.[citation needed]

This looks stupid. Maybe some masculinists' slander on the Moso culture. As far as I know, the Mosos are indeed poor but freer than the outside world, as power of government rarely reach there. And this person seems to intentionally mix up the Tibetans with the Mosos, in all the talk about commoners and serfs and a presumed higher political power.

And there's some BS in the "political" section too. Moso men don't enjoy the whole rights of politics -- how would that be possible if Grandma has all the money? As far as I know, there's little concerned with "politics" in Moso society, unlike the outerworld, and if any, it is shared by both genders.

Indeed. Cai Hua's book says the opposite: that the elite were matrilineal as well, but married in order to fit in with the Empire. Evidence cited for this is that once the Na ruler's title was removed due to Communism, his family reverted to the 'walking marriage' type relationship. I would suggest deleting this section unless some evidence for it can be found. Ajb (talk) 08:23, 19 August 2010 (UTC)