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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-matrilineal-societies-exist-around-the-world-its-time-to-look-beyond-the-patriarchy-200825>
"Thirty years ago, I travelled to Lijiang, an ancient city in the northwest of
China’s Yunnan province in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. Lijiang’s
old town is a tangle of intersecting waterways, arched stone bridges, and
cobbled streets. Just north of the city – about five hours by road – is Lugu
Lake, and the villages of the Mosuo, one of the world’s oldest continuing
matriarchal societies.
Back then, before Lijiang’s UNESCO world heritage listing brought planeloads of
tourists, the Sino-Tibetan borderlands were an out-of-the-way place, and
difficult to reach. I took a slow boat from Hong Kong, then travelled overland,
sleeping on straw mats on riverboats, and the back seats of buses, using a
quickly acquired and entirely pragmatic Mandarin vocabulary to negotiate
China’s then emerging industrial cities.
I was anxious to catch a glimpse of a society where women and men had chosen to
arrange their lives differently from the male-dominated, Australian suburbia in
which I grew up.
In Mosuo villages, women are equal, and perhaps superior to men. Mothers and
grandmothers head households, women conduct business, and property passes down
the female line. Nuclear families do not exist. Instead, women take lovers and
have children, but they live separately from their partners. A man’s place is
in his grandmother’s house, raising his sister’s children.
It’s a way of life dating from the 13th century, at least – some say 2,000
years – that has steadily resisted being absorbed into the wider, patriarchal
Han Chinese culture. When I was there, memories of resistance to the Cultural
Revolution ran deep. Between 1966 and 1976 matrilineal families were banned;
conformity with Beijing meant putting men in charge.
Reading Angela Saini’s
The Patriarchs – How Men Came to Rule, the questions
that had preoccupied me then, as a very young woman, came back. Saini’s book is
as much about matriarchies as it is about “the patriarchy”, and as much about
real and mythical matriarchal societies as it is about the real and imagined
ways in which “the patriarchs” overthrew them.
“The word we now use to describe women’s oppression – ‘patriarchy’ – has become
devastatingly monolithic, drawing in all the ways in which women and girls
around the world are abused and treated unfairly …” she writes.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that male domination is made to look
inevitable, omnipresent, natural or biological.
And as Saini points out, “The most dangerous part of any oppression is that it
can make people believe that there are no alternatives.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
