Imagine if your brother raised your children and your husband visited a few times a week. This is the ancient cultural practice of the Mosuo people – one of the last surviving matriarchal societies in the world.
In 2012, Erin O’Dwyer travelled to China’s Yunnan province with photographer Dave Tacon to learn more about the ancient cultural practices of the Mosuo people.
In Mosuo society, women are head of the household. Children are raised in the mother’s home and uncles play father to their sisters’ children. In the Mosuo’s dialect there is no word for husband or father.
They also practise ‘walking marriage’. A woman can take as many lovers as she likes and the man visits his lover’s house at night, arriving after dark and leaving before dawn. The relationship is only made public once children come along. But even then, couples never live together. Adult men and women remain living in their mother’s home, while children and property always remain with the mother.
In this documentary for ABC Radio National’s 360 program, Erin visits a Mosuo village, in a remote and mountainous part of Yunnan. She meets the young Mosuo men and women who still practise walking marriage, and the elderly grandmother-matriarchs who guard and protect the ancient way of Mosuo life.
You can listen to Erin’s documentary on ABC RN here.
The documentary was also selected for broadcast on the prestigious Third Coast International Audio Festival.
You can also read Erin’s feature story on the Mosuo for The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine here.
Photo: Dave Tacon
ABC Radio National | 360 Documentaries | 28 April, 2013
Photo: A Mosuo woman prepares for a traditional fire dance in Xiaoluoshui, a village on the edge of Lugu Lake, in China’s Yunnan province.