A Funeral as a Festival: Celebrations of Life in the Mosuo Tribe in China

Abstract

This article attempts to provoke a discussion concerning the definition and nature of festivals by considering the process of Mosuo funerals in Southwest China as a festival event. The role of women and men in daily life and within the funeral ceremony is discussed – the Mosuo is a matriarchal society – as are the vernacular architectural settings which have evolved for both ritual and everyday activities. The article looks at the religious perception of death in Mosuo culture, which considers funerals as celebrations of a life cycle including birth, growing up and death; through onsite observations, it documents the process of a Mosuo funeral in relation to its physical space. Even though, unlike most other festivals, funerals occur at unpredictable times, it is argued that for the Mosuo the funeral event is also a festival.

Keywords:

• funeral
• matriarchal
• grandmother’s house
• life cycle
• religious celebration

Notes

1 Alessandro Falassi, “Festival: Definition and Morphology,” in Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 1–10.

2 For the definition of “festival” in Latin, see the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 686, 694–695.

3 Falassi, “Festival: Definition and Morphology,” 2.

4 Jacqueline S. Thursby, Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for the Living (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 127.

5 Falassi, “Festival: Definition and Morphology,” 2.

6 Ibid., 1.

7 “Walking marriage” or “visiting marriage” (Zouhun in Chinese) is the term used to describe all ongoing sexual relationships in Mosuo culture; these relationships are based on mutual affection, and are not necessarily permanent. Men do not live with their female partners. They usually meet at night at the woman’s house and at dawn the man returns home to his own maternal family. They do not set up a new family and do not share property. Any children resulting from the union of the couple are the women’s, while the man helps to raise the children of his sisters; Tami Blumenfield, The Na of Southwest China: Debunking the Myths (Washington, DC: Blumenfield, 2009), 3. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20110720025007/http://web.pdx.edu/∼tblu2/Na/myths.pdf (accessed April 30, 2018).

8 Chuan-Kang Shih, “Mortuary Rituals and Symbols among the Moso,” in Naxi and Moso Ethnography, ed. Michael Oppitz and Elisabeth Hsu (Zurich: Volkerkundemuseum Zurich, 1998), 103–125.

9 Chuan-Kang Shih, Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 219–222.

10 The primitive religion of the Mosuo people is called Daba, which is a combination of ancestral worship, spirit worship and nature worship. Dabaism has no written scriptures, systematic creeds, classic books, religious organizations or monasteries. All its doctrine is retained in the memory of its practitioners, the Daba, and learned by rote orally from generation to generation. The Mosuo also practice Lamaism, a Tibetan variation of Buddhism, in which a lama is a spiritual leader. Since the mid-sixteenth century, Tibetan Buddhism has gradually become the dominant religion among the Mosuo. Before the 1956 Democratic Reform in the Mosuo area, Tibetan Buddhism was prevalent to the extent that almost every household had at least one member serving as a professional lama; Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association (LLMCDA), Mosuo Religion (2006), available online: http://www.mosuoproject.org (accessed April 30, 2018). The LLMCDA was an association directed by John Lombard, focused on Mosuo cultural preservation and development.

11 Since the mid-sixteenth century, Tibetan Buddhism has gradually become the dominant religion in the Mosuo area; Chuan-Kang Shih, “Mortuary Rituals and Symbols among the Moso,” 105.

12 Christine Mathieu, A History and Anthropological Study of the Ancient Kingdoms of the Sino-Tibetan Borderland – Naxi and Mosuo (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003), 35.

13 Chuan-Kang Shih, “Mortuary Rituals and Symbols among the Moso,” 123.

14 The Mosuo believed that it took forty-nine days for the soul to travel back to the ancestral land. According to Tibetan Buddhism, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth takes forty-nine days.

15 Sibuanawa is a mythical place, an ideal kingdom for the Mosuo, a heaven where the souls of their ancestors rest and live. As the legend is told, “in the olden days, the Na emigrated from Sibuanawa, their original village, to the south;” Cai Hua and Asti Hustvedt, A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China (New York: Zone, 2001), 102, 169.

16 Huashan Zhou, Wu fu Wu fu de Guo du? Zhong nv bu qing nan de mu xi Mosuo [A Society without Fathers or Husbands? Discrimination against Neither Female nor Male in the Mosuo Family] (Beijing: Guang ming ri bao chu ban she [Guangming Daily Newspaper Publ. House], 2001), 42–44.

17 Prayer song, recorded in Shaoquan He, Zhongguo Mosuo ren [The Mosuo People in China] (Yunnan: Yunnan Renmin, 2017), 541.

18 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of passage (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 10.

19 Thursby, Funeral Festivals in America, 16.

20 Ibid., 17.

21 Ibid., 16.

22 Ibid., 17.

23 Angus Gillespie, cited in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Garland, 1996), 230.

24 Falassi, “Festival: Definition and Morphology,” 3.

25 Wayne K. Davies, “Festive Cities: Multi-dimensional Perspectives,” in Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems, ed. Wayne K. Davies (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 533–561, at 535.

26 Cudny Waldemar, “The Phenomenon of Festivals: Their Origins, Evolution, and Classifications,” Anthropos, 109, no. 2 (2014): 640–656.

27 Susan Kalcik, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 49.

28 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, A Study in Religious Sociology (London: Allen & Unwin and New York: Macmillan, 1915).

29 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 20–65.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Huichao Feng

Huichao Feng is a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Design at Birmingham City University. Her research focuses on the dwellings of the Mosuo in Southwest China, looking at the relationship between inhabited space and architectural form, and its evolution in the face of cultural and social change. She completed her M.A. in Interior Design at Birmingham City University and her B.A. in Environment Art Design at Beijing Forestry University. Her doctoral research is fully funded by the China Scholarship Council.

Jieling Xiao

Jieling Xiao is a lecturer in Environmental Design at Birmingham City University. Her current research focuses on theories and practices of place-making and environmental design through people’s sensory experiences, particularly of soundscape and smellscape.