October 2020,
The documentary "Na Ren Said" was launched,
For the first time, we saw 25 Mosuo people collectively take the camera and make a sound.
Narration: Who are we?
The Mosuo are the only matriarchal clan society that still exists in China.
"Marriage" is the public's first stereotype of the Mosuo people,
It is also the source of the deepest misunderstanding of them.
In the film, the Mosuo people reinterpret their own tradition of "walking marriage",
How to include love, responsibility and respect,
There are also the characteristics of the patriarchal system of matriarchal society:
There are no "left-behind children", "empty nesters",
You can go home without making money outside,
Marriage without bride price,
After marriage, there is no problem of adding a name to the house...
We interviewed Wang Zhe, the director of "Na Ren Shu",
and two Mosuo people,
Here's what they said.
Editor Xie Yimin, Editor-in-Charge Shi Ming
"Can you fall in love with a lot of women?"
"Na Ren Says" is an oral documentary about the Mosuo ethnic group, which has more than two dozen Mosuo people standing in front of the camera and telling everyone who I am? How did I grow up? What do I miss? What makes me sad? So it was a collective confession of the Mosuo people.
We interviewed about 30 Mosuo people, including Dab, the female director of the Mosuo family, Daba, a religious person in the Mosuo ethnic group who has a spiritual leading role, and also interviewed a very important profession in Mosuo culture, carpentry.
During the nearly 1 month of filming, we rarely went to the bars and KTV places in Lugu Lake, and more to the Homes of the Mosuo people to get along with them.
In the process of contacting the Mosuo people, we will try to learn some Mosuo dialect, master some basic grammar and nouns, such as how "we" say, how "everyone" says, so that we can understand what they are saying in interviews.
Director Wang Zhe gave an exclusive interview
During the live interview, a girl gave us simultaneous interpretation, because she could not make a sound, so when the interviewee spoke, she took a pencil and wrote down the key words of each sentence in Chinese. For example, she will write "part-time work", "homesick" and "fire pond", we can understand that the other party may be talking about where she lived during her work in Beijing, but she is still very homesick and misses the fire pit at home, so that we can ask questions in time in the case of language barriers.
The film we are seeing now is the form of 20 Mosuo people telling the camera, and in the middle of it, we have also considered shooting a Mosuo family for a long time. But when we were doing research in the early stages, we chatted with a lot of Mosuo people, and we could feel that they were extremely insecure about endorsing others, such as saying that what he said to whom last time, but then what became. In such an era of information explosion, they feel that their voice is very weak.
We have a friend of Mosuo called Terracotta Warriors, who said that most of the Mosuo people around him, even children, may have been subjected to "Are your parents divorced?" "Do you know who your own dad is?" "Can you fall in love with a lot of women?" Questions like that. So then we decided that even the tiniest voice would be for them to speak for themselves.
Director Wang Zhe and Mosuo's grandmother are together
"I met a snake on the road,
Will go and ask What about Daba? ”
In fact, the connotation of Mosuo culture is very rich, its view of nature, its creation origin, how they look at the relationship between people, how the order of the elderly and young in the family is, and some of the norms of their lives are not only a view of marriage or a view of spouse.
So in the documentary, we divided 6 themes, "myth", "Daba", "grandmother", "love", "outside world" and "future", which are not only important to Mosuo culture, but also make us feel empathy.
For the Mosuo people, there are two more important religions involved in their lives, one is Buddhism, and the other is their native faith called Dabbas.
For their ethnic group, the two religions are not contradictory and integrate very well. The Daba plays a deeper role in their lives, because from the birth of a Mosuo, the rite of passage to the death, in each month of the year, there are rituals closely related to life, some are farming, some are the birth of children in the family, or when something goes wrong, they have to get rid of obscurity, etc., and the Daba will preside over the ceremony.
Old photo of Daba by Joseph Locke in the 1930s
The old photo of Daba is quoted from "Mosuo Art" Liu Suihai photographed
When daba does the ritual, he needs to recite different scriptures, for example, they have genesis scriptures in them, how the world came to be, how the heavens and the earth came to be, and the gods of water and mountains.
Daba is generally not full-time, he has his own profession, such as some monks, some are drivers, and he is invited to do the rituals that Dabba should do.
Daba does the ceremony
In the Han culture we are familiar with, it is difficult to find a character like Daba to compare, because we rarely entrust our lives to a certain person to decide.
But when the Mosuo people encounter problems that they can't solve in their lives, they will go to Daba and give their troubles and confusion to Daba, and Daba will give them answers, and once they hand them over, they will no longer worry about their troubles.
For example, if a Mosuo person is driving today and sees a snake on the road, maybe the snake is an unlucky or worrying thing in their cultural system, they will ask The Daba what to do? Is it good or bad to encounter this snake in this situation? Is there any way to resolve it?
The most romantic person in the whole village
The oldest daba in our film is the most romantic person in the whole village.
Because he especially likes to see beautiful scenery, when he was young, he built a simple shed on a mountainside near his home, and then cleaned up the small wooden shed, and he sat in it to simmer tea, a kind of canned tea that was drunk in Sichuan, Yunnan, made a fire, put the teapot next to it, put the teapot inside the pot, and then he drank tea while doing some small carpentry, sitting in the small shed in the mountains to watch the scenery under the mountain.
Stills from "Na Ren Says"
When he was a little older, because of the inconvenience of his legs and feet, he could not go so far, so he built another shed in the backyard of his home, planted with all kinds of flowers, and when he was fine, he walked a dozen steps to the shed, upside down the flowers, or just sat there, did nothing, and looked at these flowers outside the shed with satisfaction.
When we interviewed old Daba, he asked us to say that you are all from outside, my legs and feet are not very good, can you help me buy a plaster to treat the skin on my feet, send me over, we said yes.
The oldest in Muri, The Dabhimpadukhi
When we returned to Beijing, I remembered that day that we had just made this ab in shorthand and translated the Mosuo dialect into Chinese, and we thought of sending plasters to Lao Daba, so we contacted the village.
Unfortunately, they said that the old Daba had passed away yesterday, and now everyone in the village helped him in his house and gave him a ceremony. The old man was old and always had to leave, but we had the impression that the old Daba had always been the one who had only a few teeth left in his mouth and then grinned at us.
I imagine him always sitting on the mountainside or in the backyard of his home, using a romantic mood to enjoy the flowers and plants around him.
The Mosuo people by Lugu Lake
"If the people outside walk like the Mosuo people,
It's going to starve to death. ”
In the past, the Mosuo people rarely went outside to work, and this ethnic group was relatively heavy in family concepts, and the concept of hometown was also very heavy, and they may not choose to work outside unless they had to.
We heard a winemaking lady Dabu say that if you don't go out to work at home, your income is very small, but if you go out to work, you can have an income of a few thousand yuan a year, and give it to a person who is more good at running the family, you can manage the family and live.
Winemaking lady Dab
Now many of the Mosuo young people we come into contact with are post-90s, and when they were young, the information has been more developed, and the road is also open, so more and more people will go out to work.
But in fact, it is difficult for them to have too many career choices, Mosuo people's Mandarin is not so good, or can not write Chinese characters, then they can not play the computer, may not be able to keep an account. So they do more manual work, such as washing dishes in a restaurant, helping others move a little bit, or helping people look at a store in a clothing store.
The Mosuo youth Danzendella went out to work and did 8 jobs
And after working outside, it is difficult for them to accept the rhythm of big cities, even if it is a central city like Lijiang, which is already too fast-paced for them. There is a carpenter who said that the older generation of Mosuo has taught the younger generation to walk slowly, and if you walk fast, you feel anxious to grasp something, which is a very unlucky performance. The culture of the Mosuo people believes that leisurely and self-reliant, not chasing or robbing is the blessed state.
So he joked that if people outside walked like the Mosuo people, they would starve to death, because they couldn't fight for anything, they couldn't grab anything. Their own culture didn't raise them to be a very competitive person.
Dorjee the carpenter holds the children of the extended family
There was a Mosuo youth named Gaug, who said that he had gone outside and realized that he was originally a Mosuo man. He went to Shenzhen, saw the appearance of Shenzhen's big city, when dealing with people outside, others will ask him, eh you Mosuo people, ask him some things related to Mosuo culture, he told people about this, he slowly clarified his identity.
Most of the Mosuo people who go out to work will eventually return to their hometowns. Because they have a very strong concept of hometown, when they reach a certain age, they feel that they want to go home. They joked that if they died outside, they might not be a Mosuo themselves.
Mosuo youth Gao Ge, is now a promoter of Mosuo culture
In the Mosuo community, it is relatively rare for young adults to go out to work, and children or the elderly have no one to take care of them, which is related to their special family structure.
According to the traditional Mosuo marriage model, the child lives with the mother in the mother's big family, and the father lives in his original big family, is an uncle, and will raise his sister's children.
In your mother's extended family, your uncle will take care of you, your aunt will take care of you, your grandmother on top, and then the old lady on top. Four generations in the same house, they will do their best to raise the younger generation and support the elderly, so there is no problem with the small family model of "left-behind children" and "left-behind elderly".
"Individuals in the city,
Both men and women are quite like warriors. ”
The Mosuo house resembles the concept of a quadrangle. The highest is the warp building, the grandmother's house is one floor, the grandmother lives in it, the grandmother's house is next to the two-story or higher, and even some large families will do two-and-a-half to three-story warp buildings, and then there are some flower houses next to it, which is the bedroom of the younger generation of the family.
Floor plan of the grandmother's house
The grandmother's house in the hearts of the Mosuo people is not just a space, it has its own soul. They will imagine how many ancestors have lived in this house, and they will feel that the ancestor gods are protecting themselves.
When they eat, there is a fire pond, there is a pot stone under the Vulcan card, every time they eat, they will first put rice or vegetables on the pot stone, and when they drink butter tea, stand up and sprinkle it, these actions indicate ancestor sacrifice.
This sense of ritual reminds you to honor every being, which may be a deity or a deceased predecessor.
So when we go to the Mosuo family, usually we will bring a little souvenir, even a bag of candy, first go to their grandmother's house to sacrifice the pot, and put the gifts we brought on their stove. They would warmly invite us into our grandmother's house and sit down, and then we would all sit around the fire.
Grandmother Indoor View
Once we slapped them dancing, a Mosuo collective dance called beating. Originally, I thought that after we finished shooting, they would stop dancing, but after we finished shooting, they continued to sing and dance, and the group had a lot of fun. This mentality, which blooms at any time, makes us feel that they are extremely free, enthusiastic, and dancing for the pleasure of dancing, not to cooperate with our shooting tasks.
When I see this, I feel a sense of nostalgia. Because when I was a child, my family also burned traditional stoves, and there were some softer family habits and harmonious neighborhood relations. Sometimes life is too lacking in rituals, but these rituals can actually make your spirit change from a very dry state to a more gentle one. You will feel that you are wrapped in a certain culture, not without a place to come, so don't be too afraid of the front.
We've lived in the city for a long time, and a lot of times we're like a man with armor. We believe in personal ability, do not easily show our weaknesses to others, and do not show our fragile side.
Because there is a condition for living in the city is not to cause trouble for others, so each of our individuals in the city, whether male or female, is quite like a warrior.
Mosuo women and children in the grandmother's house
In addition to Wang Zhe, the director of "Na Ren Shu", we interviewed two Mosuo people who studied their own culture, and the following is their self-statement:
Dan Shi Ram 28 years old Holds a master's degree in ethnology from Yunnan University
Couples sleeping apart is a tradition we have had for thousands of years
I was born into a family of Mosuo intellectuals. Dad worked at the financial office of Ninglang County, was the first of 6 brothers and sisters to go out to high school, my mother was Han Chinese, working in the post office, the two got married and then returned to the countryside of Yongning to live, giving birth to my sister and me.
Since childhood, parents have paid more attention to their children's education, and our mothers will order us magazines related to learning from the post office, chinese composition, "Little Edison" popular science magazine, and Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tales. I used to go to school in the countryside of Yongning in junior high school, and I had the opportunity to go to Kunming Yunnan Normal University Affiliated High School in high school, and my family was also very supportive.
When I was in high school, the classmates were basically Han Chinese, and once the same table held an article in a magazine about the marriage of the Mosuo people and asked me if what was written in it was true? You Mosuo people don't know who your father is? Can tourists from outside get married when they go to your place?
Mosuo bonfire evening
I was particularly surprised to see it, not as written in the article, and we all knew who our father was. My little uncle and sister-in-law were married, and every night he would ride his bike to my grandmother's house, and the relationship between the two was stable, but they didn't live together.
A few days ago, I also saw a young man of our Mosuo on Douyin performing a flower climbing, which should just cater to the imagination of the outside world for Mosuo people.
On our side, if the men and women have a good feeling for each other, before the marriage relationship is determined, they do not go to each other's homes, and more privately meet. It is not until the two people are sure to be together that the man will come to the woman's house one night, meet the elders, bring gifts, and pay homage to the fire god.
In fact, there is only a formal difference between marriage and marriage, that is, the husband and wife do not live together. Generally speaking, both spouses stay in the extended family of their respective mothers.
Marriage does not mean that you can change partners at will, although we do not explicitly stipulate that husband and wife should be loyal to each other, but there is a moral law, such as a couple of people in the village know that they are two small, one of them is ambiguous or good with others, everyone will not scold him on the surface, and the heart will still spit.
Mosuo female elders brush their hair for their juniors
The phenomenon of marriage and separation of families is increasing
Now, we Mosuo people are not all matrilineal families, generally speaking, there are 3 forms, the matrilineal family where the husband and wife live separately, the nuclear family where the husband and wife are independent, and the matrilineal and patrilineal dual-line coexistence family that marries into the excess.
Take our family as an example, because my mother is Han Chinese, it is equivalent to marrying in and living in my father's big family, and my sister-in-law is married, and my sister-in-law's children also live with us.
Now the phenomenon of separation in the Mosuo family is becoming more and more common. When I was young, I lived with a large family of 14 people, and soon my parents also came out of my grandmother's house and built their own house to live alone.
The older generation of Mosuo is actually not very able to accept this situation, they think that the people and property in the extended family should not be divided, so the younger generation will be more solemn in dividing the family, first discuss with one or two trusted people in the family, the site selection can not be too far from the hometown, basically in the village, and then when a large family is there.
As for whether the house is built next to the man's home or the woman's home, this depends on the situation of the children on both sides. If it happens that there are more men in the man's family and fewer women in the woman's family, it will be built near the woman's home, and try to ensure that the number of men and women in the two large families is balanced and easy to do.
Old photographs of the Mosuo family in the 1990s
Male outside, female inside
Without prejudice to equality between men and women
In the Mosuo family, it is generally headed by female elders, and the female supervisor in the family is called Dabu.
When I was a child, our family's Dab was my grandmother, and she would assign a large family of people who would do what to do, such as my aunt who was responsible for cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, uncle going to the mountains to cut firewood and herd pigs, girls to cut pig grass, boys to herd cattle, she fed pigs, cattle and sheep herself.
Money is also the grandmother's supervisor, in addition to the cost of buying grain, buying cattle and horses, the biggest expense is on the child's tuition. The decision to go to Kunming to go to high school was made by myself, my grandmother did not intervene much, my father felt that Kunming was too far from home, worried that I would be difficult to adapt to the transition from a small village to the provincial capital, but I did not want to give up this opportunity, and my family also fully supported. Every time I came back from Kunming, my grandmother would tell me to study well and take care of myself outside.
Young Dab
Elderly grandmother
The people in the village are concentrated in the new year to March, the red and white celebration or the construction of a new house, usually the female supervisor represents the whole family. Guests will bring gift boxes with gift money and bamboo weaving to the host, which may contain rice or tobacco, alcohol and tea, and the host will prepare a gift box in return.
In fact, the Mosuo people are also "the female inside, the male outside" division of labor, women are in charge of internal affairs, and men such as uncles are responsible for going out to do business and asking for help. But our Concept of Men and Women in Mosuo is more equal, the fundamental reason may lie in the succession system, the Han tradition is calculated according to the patrilineal line, most of the time on our side follows the mother's surname, and the child lives in the mother's big family after birth.
The 26-year-old deputy director of the Mosuo Folk Museum
There will never be a dabba who has mastered all the Dabbas
The Dapa used to be the tibetan equivalent of a "guru" in the life of the Mosuo people.
When the Mosuo people encounter some supernatural phenomena that they cannot explain, they will consult the Daba. For example, we all know that snakes will hibernate, if in the winter, go out and see a snake, or the snake ran into the house, the Mosuo people will feel that this is a symbol of bad luck, the heart is very uneasy, will ask Daba to solve the puzzle, let him judge whether this matter is really harmful to himself, if it is, please ask him to do the relevant rituals to eliminate the disaster.
The Mosuo family usually invites Daba to his home to recite the scriptures, either at marriage or funeral or during the Spring Festival. When I was 13 years old, my parents were working in the county seat and returned to the countryside of Ningli to do the ceremony.
Young Daba
On the morning of the first day of the Chinese New Year, the ceremony was held, and the male elders of the corresponding eight characters of the birthday helped me take off my old clothes and change my clothes. After the change of clothes, next to the male pillar of the grandmother's house, one foot stepped on the pork belly, and the other foot stepped on the grain, which means that there will be no worries about eating and wearing in the future. Then kowtow to the pot village and the old people present, daba read a blessing, and the next two to three days will continue to visit relatives' homes.
The Daba is generally part-time, performing rituals for the people of the village, and each family will give some symbolic remuneration, but it is very small, basically a voluntary act, and cannot be used to make a living. So most of the dabbas come from a family, and their parents and grandparents are engaged in this profession.
There are also apprentices, such as the old Daba in a village died, there is no new Daba to take over, it is very inconvenient to go outside to ask Daba to come over, if someone proposes to learn to be a Daba, the whole village will give economic and spiritual support, and a very solemn celebration ceremony will be held for the new Daba on the day of completion.
Old photo of Daba Ruheng Ci Ren Dorjee in the 1990s
At present, there are very few Daba in Yongning, and there is no one who can master the More than 60 Daba Sutras.
Dapa and Tibetan Buddhism exist in Both Mosuo Society, and many rituals can be done by Dharma, as can lamas. The Buddhist system is more stringent, there are very strict requirements for the dress and life of lamas, and each family will make offerings, unlike the Dapa usually and the common people, there is no difference, in the Mosuo society is more respected. Therefore, the Mosuo people in the Yongning area often invite lamas to perform ceremonies, not as often as the Dabbado in the Labo and Muli areas.
Bilingual teaching is popular in Mosuo schools
Now the Mosuo society and the outside world are more on the same frequency, children like to watch short videos, play mobile games, as iQiyi members to watch favorite cartoons. When we were kids, we loved playing with the water and mud, but we also loved watching TV and renting DVDs on the street.
Mosuo children are more accustomed to speaking Mandarin, in fact, our generation is also the same. When children go to school, the first thing they do is to speak Mandarin and write Chinese characters, and the teacher also requires that mandarin be spoken from novels, only speaking the mother tongue, not speaking Mandarin, and unable to integrate into society.
In the past two years, the Mosuo people have a strong sense of protecting their mother tongue, and bilingual teaching has begun to be popular in schools, first learning their mother tongue and then learning Mandarin. Elders in the family also require children to speak Mandarin at school, but must speak Mosuo when returning home. When the child speaks Mandarin smoothly, the elders will correct him and let him speak the same meaning in Mosuo again, so many of my relatives and friends speak Mosuo and Mandarin very smoothly.
Mosuo kids
Among the Mosuo people who go out to work, there are also big leaders in the enterprise, but they come back very much, and 6-7 out of 10 people may come back. When the farmers are busy, help the family to work, in recent years, Lugu Lake tourism has been developed, and the local area also needs a lot of labor, a variety of service personnel, art performers, many people choose to work near their hometown.
The little Mosuo boy in the film said that he wanted to be an explorer, did not want to be a boss, and after earning money, he would go on an adventure around the world. In fact, the spirit of adventure is the common nature of Mosuo men, we have a long tradition of horse gangs to drive horses and do business, and people in the past may also be very eager to go out and break in. Rather than saying that the younger you are, the more you yearn to go out, but rather that this is a continuation of tradition.
However, most of the Mosuo people who have gone outside are more willing to return to their hometown, which may also be related to the strong hometown complex of the Mosuo people. The Mosuo people believe that if they cannot die at home, they cannot return to the "Sibu Anawa" (mosuo ancestral land). Death outside is considered accidental or unnatural and is very unlucky for the Mosuo people.
No matter what kind of ethnic group it is, you may prefer the environment that you are familiar with, warm, and grew up in.
The inscription is from the stills of the movie "Journey to the West Daughter Country"