ZhaoFei,

the Lijiang Teacher’s Institute, Lijiang 674100, Yunnan, China

This paper analyses the inner values of “the marital customary law” and “the maternal family” for the Naxi Mosuo People from the viewpoint of the law diversity theory and the informal institutional theory. The behavior of marriage is the essential content of the marital customary law. In the paper, the author analyses the family structure of the maternal family and the patrilineal family, the relations among consanguinity, bringing up children, heirdom, property allocation and family members.

The author suggests that we should deal with the relation between the constitution and the marital customary law properly. The methods of protecting Mosuo’s customs and culture are to exert the ethnic customary law and strengthen the supervision of legislation, justice and law. The Mosuo customary law has a set of unique norm and system for marriage, bringing up children, child planning, property allocation and partition. There is no father-in-law, son-in-law and etc in the maternal family. It is helpful to eliminate family contradiction and promote harmony of families and communities. In fact, the constitution can not be adopted there. According to the international and domestic law, inhabitant has the right to carry out and prosper their cultural tradition and customs. Autonomous regions have rights to adjust regulations and laws according to the condition there. The focus of the paper is the possibility of transforming the customs of the marital family into the law.

The law diversity theory and the informal institutional theory have many advantages. The theories provide guarantee for the development of ethnic groups. It is advantageous to realize the interactivity between the national law and the ethnic customary law. The theories allow the ethnic groups to settle affairs in their own ways on the basis of not hindering the national benefits. Legislators should adjust the ethnic customary law with the national law. There are five parts in the paper. The first part is the values of Mosuo marriage custom; the second part is the content of Mosuo’s marital customary law; the third part is the collision between the national law and the marital customary law; the fourth part is the adjustment between two laws; the last part is the practical significance of the marital customary law in constructing harmonious society.

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He Zhonghua  YASS

Naxi is a small ethnic nationality, it only has 300,000 population, and the distributions are concentration mainly, separation subsidiarily. The Naxi lives in the area of the borders of Yunnan, Sichuan and Tibetan. The diversified marriages and the cultural connotations provide the lively verification for the evolution history of human being’s marriages. Meantime, they also show the relationships of social cultural changes and the styles of marriages and families.

1、Marriages and Families of Naxi are: different place has different styles, but included each other and impact each other.

There are several models of them: The family style is one husband one wife in the places where Lijiang and Baidi; walking marriage and matrilineal family in Yongning; There are the polyandruos families and polygamous families in Er Ya. But if observe the different phenomena carefully, we can find in one place, has multi-marriages or in same style has different connotation.

2. The reasons: the origin of Naxi’s marriage was pairing marriage and pairing families, the present marriages are the results of cultural changes. The changes decided by survival environment and cultural characters. For the people who lived in the open environment and easier absorbed other cultures, formed the style of “Derived marriage and family”; For the people who in close place, still keep the origin style (relatively). For the people who in the middle of both, has both characters. But it influenced by mainstreaming culture in this area.

3        Several  apocalypses

• The changes of marriage and family also keep to the rule of cultural changes, it is a dynamic system. For Naxi, it went through different history stages, from nomadic migration to agriculture ecesis; from kept original culture to absorbed other cultures then conflicted by stronger culture.

• The marriage and family style in actual life, they are the results through filtrated by history, culture and survival, they have own basement and rationality. We should recognize the difference of culture.

• Diversity of marriage and family reflected the diversity of human society and cultures, we need take au pair attitude to deal with them, and not seek novelty and snooty. Respect the differences of cultures, overcome the cultural interlayer should be the quality of anthropology.

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