A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China (review)

Future studies of human social organization will be obliged to take account of Cai Hua's work on Na kinship. The Na are a cultural minority of thirty-thousand mountain farmers in northern Yunnan. Their mode of organizing sexuality and reproduction without husbands or fathers provides yet another in a long history of challenges to anthropological definitions of marriage and family. One index of this unusual system is the kinship terminology: it is "strictly classificatory" and reckons consanguineous links only through women. The system fits none of the basic types proposed by anthropologist George P. Murdock, who did the last comprehensive study on human social organization fifty years ago. In Cai's estimation, the Na system represents a newly discovered ethnological type.

From the indigenous perspective, however, the consequence of challenging a definition has more pertinence if it is due to resisting the moral sensibilities of a ruling power. In this case the ruling power's ideas about sex and family are defined by Han-Chinese norms of marriage, which Na custom rejects. The consequence is that mandarins of the former Qing dynasty and agents of the communist regime have tried to make the Na accept the Han institution of marriage. The attempt in the 1960s to force marriage on the Na was especially heavy-handed and regrettably used information gathered from Na informants by anthropologists. But despite these attempts and despite the effects of other cultural changes, the Na way of reckoning descent and organizing domestic life and sexual practice has showed an amazing resilience. Even those Na who stood to gain materially by the redistribution of land rejected land reform when the communists sought to bypass their localized matrilineal descent groups or matrilignées.

Cai grounds his ethnography in the history of Na encounters with the state. He argues that the three-tier system of consumption-based status groups was an accommodation of the matrilineal system to the imperial power of the Qing dynasty. The "aristocratic" tier was formed when the local prefect (zhifu) was obliged to adopt the concept of paternity, the patronymic, and marriage in order to legitimate his heirs in service to the central government. But this was mostly veneer since the prefect's lignée never adopted the paternal transmission of consanguinity. Cai details the design and stratagems of the status system, the social mobility, the ritual rebellions, the consortiums between tiers, and the consequent problems of inheritance. Communist power was more successful in supplanting this local pecking order by recruiting Na leaders into the party-state apparatus than it was in changing Na domestic practices.

The core of Cai's study is the domestic organization of sexual practices in which there are no husbands or fathers. The basic unit of social production and reproduction is the matrilignée, which is formed from several generations domiciled around the solidarity between mothers and daughter and between sisters and brothers. The sibling incest taboo is rigorously observed to the extent that even the slightest evocation of sex among consanguine relatives of the opposite sex is forbidden: the sister must bed a man from another lignée in order to perpetuate her own (and her brother's) lignée. Since the sexual encounter takes place in the domicile of her lignée, it must be furtive to avoid her brothers. What is so unusual, however, is that "the identity of her children's genitors is never important" (p. 296). Conversely, men express no wish to sire children.

The basic, customary, and ubiquitous mode of sexual encounter is the furtive visit. This type of visitation has a man creeping into a woman's bed after nightfall and leaving before dawn. (Women do not visit men in their domiciles.) The visit is supposed to be an obligation-free encounter, and there is no involvement of the woman's mother or brothers. When a man arrives at a woman's...