Marriage. How much sorrow, misery, humiliation; how many tears and curses; what agony and suffering has this word brought to humanity.
Marriage, Emma Goldman
In anthropological research, marriage has long been taken for granted as a cornerstone of most societies across the world. A group of people arranges their labor and reproduction through a sexually entangled couple – sometimes resorting to violence, threats, and deception to maintain this primary relationship.
Although Chinese society is known primarily for the “velvet bonds”[1] of its patriarchal system that depends upon the production of sons within a legally recognized marriage, the territory which China stretches over includes that of the often exoticized “minorities” who exist for the Han Chinese majority as a dreamy fantasy to project their own dissatisfactions onto.
Lake Lugu. Photo by JuniperPhoton on Unsplash
The Moso people of the Yongning River basin in southwest China became notorious for the way that they lived and loved. Families were matrilineal, and they tended to remain in their natal household throughout their lives (although there were exceptions). When a girl reached maturity, she was given her own room where she could receive visitors. In their stilted houses, women’s private bedrooms had a trap door with a ladder leading outside, and a woman could freely receive visitors through the door, men she had met during the day and invited back at night. They would throw rocks at her window, or sing, and she’d let them up. They would leave in the morning, but after a while, their relationship would be recognized by her family. When she was done with the relationship, she would simply lock her door to him. When he was over it, he’d just stop coming by. Having one main lover didn’t mean a woman or man would stop taking others, but in general, it was too much hard work to maintain simultaneous important long-term relationships. The others they let visit them were just for variety and out of interest. When important relationships ended, either one or both of the parties may have felt burned, but they had almost limitless prospects for romance, so enmity was quickly forgotten.
A person’s family had no reason to pressure them to maintain a relationship. There was no stigma around ending one either. Children belonged to the mother’s line (unless adopted out), and nothing changed in their lives when their mother changed partners, since their relationship to their biological father was not as close as their connection to their mother’s male relatives, and these family members didn’t change. The legal institution of marriage did and does exist among the Moso, and has for centuries. The “walking marriages” of the Moso, or 走婚zouhun as it is known to Chinese anthropologists, were also a recognized social institution, but these were characterized by being non-legal, non-contractual, non-obligatory, and non-exclusive.[2] No one would start such a relationship in order to increase their wealth or social status, so it had a very different outcome than marriage.
Its very description by Chinese intellectuals and writers as a primitive, golden age utopia is what led to its marginalization as an acceptable model of social reproduction. Novelists deified it, travel shows exoticized it, and soon tour buses spilled outsiders by the hundreds into a village by Lake Lugu that had once been a remote backwater. Working women moved in from the coast, donned the ethnic costume of the native woman, and plied their trade in the red-light district that was set up in front of a once sleepy Moso village, and local men and women arranged trysts as tour guides, set up public dances as entertainment, or sold cheap trinkets on the roadside. The more entrepreneurial among them entered into legal marriages with coastal businessmen in order to gain the capital to erect multistory hotels to capture the money flowing in.[3]
Certainly, remnants are left of the traditional matrilineal family system, in which children remain in the mother’s family, and people do not need to change their living arrangements and residences solely in order to sleep with another person. Such an arrangement most closely parallels economically developed urban societies, specifically those of Euro-America, in which formal marriages are no longer a pre-requisite to giving birth. In the US, children born outside of a legal marriage were likely to remain in their mother’s household, and in 2019, the US had the largest amount of women and children living in this domestic arrangement in the entire world.[4] Contrast this with the East Asian legal structure, which privileges the father’s family – the courts are more likely to favor the father’s family with custody and rights over the children, and children take on the father’s surname (women in Taiwan and Hong Kong do not change their surname when they marry). This has been rationalized to me based on the fact that it is the father’s household that tends to have greater economic resources, so the courts favor the child’s material well-being over anything else. Additionally, East Asia has the lowest rate of births that occur outside of marriage – marriage and housing are often considered pre-requisites for childbirth.
The old, traditional Chinese patrilineal, patriarchal family structure directly opposes that of the Moso. The purpose is to produce legitimate sons, and in this system, women were, for the most part, tradeable commodities. Family members could be bought and sold in order to round out a family’s structure so that there were an ideal number of sons (not so many that inheritance becomes an issue) and daughters (not so many that it strains the family’s resources), etc. The living could be made to marry the spirits of the dead to complete a family in the afterlife. The corpse of a strange woman can be purchased to toss into the grave of a single male scion (and an illegal trade once sprang up around this practice). The social structure of the Chinese family was consciously erected over time – its ideals are kept intact through cunning, wealth, or force. If it is untenable due to outside forces (law, economics, environment, location), then workarounds are sought.
This too, though, has changed, softened, as young people decline to have children. As the village farmhouse was replaced en masse by the apartment block, physically limiting the potential size of a family.[5] As financial markets and the ownership of private property advanced, marriage and children are no longer a person's only hope for a secure future.[6]
The American nuclear traditional family (whose tradition? you ask – I’d like to know that answer as well) does not offer the flexibility of buying and selling members, nor does it offer the easy solution of the arranged marriage, so a failure to create an accurate reproduction is a source of shame for an individual; it’s not fate, but it is a personal moral failing that leads to the condition of being single, childless, divorced, a single mother, an aged bachelor, and the punishment is to be increasingly socially isolated. If you have neared its creation, if you have a spouse, you are conditioned to hang onto them at all costs, regardless of their role in burdening your life with profligate spending, credit card debt, continual illness, complete emotional and sexual withdrawal, psychological and physical abuse, alcoholism, or a hundred other things. Your fortitude hangs in the balance of the length of a relationship, first and foremost, and its quality is an afterthought.
But aren’t people such as the Moso too quick to give up? Aren’t we supposed to tear our hair out over the fact that half of all marriages end in divorce? Why is there a social consequence for ending a love relationship in the first place? In the Moso system, there is no requirement to choose between social morality and love and sex. They are able to maintain their social obligations while separating the games and play of love into another domain of experience. For the Christian/Islam/etc.-inflected society, for Chinese traditional society, and for Hindu society (“a marriage lasts for seven lifetimes”), the sacrifice of love and sexual pleasure is often upheld as a noble one, a social virtue. This strikes me as twisted.
When expressing skepticism of monogamy, people are often recommended to try the new garden varieties of its alternatives: polyamory, open relationships, and swinging (an old classic). These are the currently existing alternatives within western society that have been created mostly as pressure release valves to maintain the form of the nuclear family intact so that one can continue to enjoy its legal protections and benefits while mitigating the drawbacks of restricting one’s pool of potential sexual partners. Only poly offers a radical alternative social structure; however, without any of the legal protections of the family, it usually devolves into nothing more than the plaything of the wealthy – no wonder it is generally favored by the spoiled children of post-war excess. Its focus remains on untrammeled sexual expression rather than the creation and maintenance of a complex net of social obligations.[7]
Some years ago, I attended a lecture held by a young woman in Taipei introducing the concept of polyamory to a few interested attendees. Most of the middle-aged participants were unimpressed, bringing up concerns related to the death or illness of a lover – in the absence of a legal relationship, their assets would be forfeited to the state. In this way, poly represented not the creation of a new, resilient family unit, but its dissolution, resulting in the individual’s uptake into the state.
Was this the intention of the early Soviet state when they attempted to abolish marriage?[8] Some among those early architects must have been young and lascivious, but many must have desired the dilution of the power of families as it ran counter to that of the state. After all, what is a mafia but a large and well-organized family? So those who do desire to destroy the concept of the family while upholding that of the state must have their aims as well.
The question that this article attempts to grapple with is not “should the [nuclear] family be abolished?” “is it disappearing?” or “should marriage be abolished?” but rather “should the foundation of a family be based on something as fragile as a love relationship?”[9] The purpose of bringing the Moso into this discussion on family structure and formation was not to extoll their pattern of sexual relations, but to emphasize that a stable family relationship can (and often does) exist without a central couple. Out of all possible relationships, that of the couple is possibly the most volatile one to build an organization on top of. With a proliferation of children born outside of marriage in the US, stable family structures which provide material well-being for both mother and child are dire necessities. In an example of a society that traditionally had no form of marriage, such structures were taken for granted, and the material care of children was a non-issue and taken care of within the natal family.
[1] Saso, Michael. (1999). Velvet Bonds: The Chinese Family. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. [2] Shih, Chuan-kang. (2009). Quest for Harmony: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [3] Walsh, E. R. (2005). From Nü Guo to Nü’er Guo: Negotiating Desire in the Land of the Mosuo. Modern China, 31(4), 448–486. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20062621 [4] Contrasted with the Moso, the US situation has dire economic consequences for the women, however, as these mothers also represent one of the largest groups living in poverty. [5] Lefebvre, Henri. (2009). The Production of Space. Trans. Nicholson-Smith, David. Wiley-Blackwell.
[6] “In the past, whenever anyone wanted to get a divorce, all of their family members would jump up to put a stop to it, because all of them had personal interests at stake. But now, all of these interest issues and efforts to avoid risk can be resolved via financial products and commercial produces, such as houses, provided by the market.” From Chen Zhiwu, “Civilization, Crisis, and How We Act in ‘Abnormal’ Situations” [7] Hardy, J. W. & Easton, D. (2017). The Ethical Slut: A practical guide to polyamory, open relationships and other freedoms in sex and love. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. [8] Wolff, M. M. (1949). Some Aspects of Marriage and Divorce Laws in Soviet Russia. The Modern Law Review, 12(3), 290–296. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1090501 [9] An early 2000s op-ed provides an alternative answer that legal monogamy is directly related to a society’s democratization and that the love relationship between two parents is the key to forming a healthy democracy.
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