Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life.

Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life, by Chuan-kang Shih. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. xvi + 329 pp. US$65.00 (hardcover).This is a remarkable of a remarkable people. The Yongning Moso, who inhabit the flat and fertile shores of Lake Lugu at 2600 meters above sea level on the Yunnan-Sichuan border, have hit the headlines due to anthropological, journalistic and touristic sensationalism. As their society is characterized as (said, following the 19th-century speculations of Johann Bachofen on the Mutterrrecht, to be more archaic than patrilineal social organization), Chinese anthropologists such as Yan Ruxian speak of a living fossil and journalists of vestiges of matriarchy. As a culture without marriage, and arguably no social recognition of husband or father, the Moso tickled leading Western anthropologists' curiosity. As a people who practice so-called tisese (walking back and forth) they have, sadly, also attracted sex tourism and all that comes with it.Tisese is what Chuan-kang Shih identifies as the culturally approved form of institutionalized sexual union, which is non-contractual, non-obligatory, and non-exclusive, and also status-blind. In cross-cultural perspective, it is a most unusual pattern of institutionalized sexual union, and it is practiced alongside marriage. Shih tells us that the Moso in the Yongning basin primarily practice tisese, while those in the surrounding hills usually prefer marriage; marriage has also been promoted, in waves of greater or less coercion, by the Chinese government.Shih's aim was to write a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, meticulously recorded and carefully analyzed ethnography (p. 18), and he has certainly achieved this. The is remarkable, not least, for the sincerity and seriousness with which it records a truly complex, multi-layered and ambiguous set of kinship practices. In style it is unusual, in that it combines an authoritative voice of normative ethnographic writing with attractive vignettes from the field. Not only do these vignettes prompt compassion for the humble anthropologist s hard work in difficult circumstances; they are also analytically crucial, as they delineate the researchers theoretical positionality. Shih started out as a graduate in history from Yunnan University before enrolling in an anthropology doctorate at Stanford University (1983-93, with 15 months fieldwork in 1987-88), under the supervision of Arthur P. Wolf and G. William Skinner. In the following 20 years, he substantiated his doctoral work with additional data from field trips in 1996 and 1997, and annually from 2002 to 2007. At the core of his is a twice-undertaken survey of all households of the same four villages in the Yongning basin: 147 households in 1988 and 167 in 2006. This long-term research has resulted in a detailed and fascinating relevant for every student of kinship, even if it may not entirely solve the conundrum of Moso kinship practices.As stated in the opening sentence, Shih defends the position that the Moso kinship system is unique: We have a very special case on our hands ... this case is bound not only to expand the limits of our knowledge but also to force us to rewrite many basic concepts in our textbooks (p. 1). Shih pursues this line of argument single-mindedly, by explicitly (as well as implicitly) arguing against other authors, point by point:(a) The Moso are a matrilineal society, but not a primitive one; in his Introduction, he argues primarily against the Chinese anthropologists who researched the Moso in the 1950s and again in the early 1980s.(b) The Yongning Moso have been matrilineal for over a millennium, in contrast to the Lijiang Naxi who have always been patrilineal. Shih consulted a wide array of traditional Chinese histories and gazetteers; based, in particular, on an intriguing paragraph in the History of the Later Han (Vol. …

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