Try to imagine a society in which there is no marriage. One where men and women take multiple sex partners in their teens, 20s and 30s, and never settle down with one. A society without husbands or fathers. One that has no word for father.
Cai Hua has just published a book in Paris claiming that the Na, a people in the remote Sichuan province of China, are casual about sex. In A Society Without Fathers or Husbands, the author argues that the matrilineal Na culture encourages dusk-to-dawn furtive visits between young men and women, and reports that most visits are not repeated and that many Na have more than 100 lovers. There is no marriage among the Na, and they don't particularly value monogamy.
The people who call themselves the Na number about 30,000. They tend to be farmers of rice, wheat, corn, and oats; most households spin their own flax and brew beer. Their religion is a mixture of ancestral worship and Tibetan Buddhism. Genetic fathers have no recognized kinship with children and no part in their upbringing. When Hua inquired after lines of generation, a 67-year-old Na woman told him: No one asks that kind of question. If you hadn't mentioned it, no one would ever have even thought about it. In procreation, the Na believes that males are waterbeds, like rain on seed, and females are primarily if not solely responsible for childbirth. Men and women take multiple sex partners. Men make furtive nocturnal visits to women’s homes and must return home before sunup, but develop no economic and usually no social bonds with their sex partners. An attempt to monopolize one's partner is always considered shameful and stupid and the villagers will mock it for a long time.
Incomprehensible as this might first appear, the.....
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