Besides flirtatious body contacts or heartfelt night conversations, singing love songs (especially duets) is another common feature of institutionalized flirtation. It can occur in day-to-day and festival flirting settings. Here is an example of a love song duet recorded during my fieldwork. This love song performance happened in the early spring of 1999 in connection with the seasonal festival for celebrating the planting of rice in the field.
Many people, male and female, young and old, from the neighboring four villages, gathered on the hillside fields to watch bullfights hosted by the Fangf Bil villagers with several other villages in the neighboring area. After the bullfights, most of the older men, women and their children left, but the young men and women stayed for the institutionalized dating. Men and women from different villages were sitting or standing close together, happily talking or singing to each other. The love song performances of some very skilled singers had also attracted a large audience.
The two female singers were from the Fangf Bil village, and the two male singers from another village, not very far from Fangf Bil. The people of the two villages spoke the same Hmub dialect and wore the same style of Hmub clothes. The two male singers, in their forties, were already married and had become fathers. One female singer, in her
22 twenties, was single, while the other, (nearly 25 years old) married with no children, still lived with her natal kin. We knew that the female singers were descendents of the same patrilineal group, but did not know their real genealogical relationships to the male singers. However, during the break and at the end of the song performance, we heard the men and women address each other using prescriptive cross-kin terms. Besides the singers, the audience was consisted of women from the Fangf Bil village, and men from another village. Like the relationships between the male and female singers, the male and female audiences were also classificatory affines.
The whole performance took the form of a spontaneous competition among the singers. They had to listen carefully to what their opposite side was singing. If they were careless, they might get lost among the verses and fail to respond correctly. The 400 verses sung by the four singers as a duet lasted for more than an hour. However, the performance was not really serious or formal. The singers talked to each other, or joked with the audience when they had finished their own verses. The audiences also talked to each other while they were enjoying the show. They liked to make comments on the performance, comparing the skills of the singers, or discussing the contents of the verses with the other members of the audience. The contents of the verses were more important than the voices. Any singer who did not pay attention to his or her turn to sing, or who did not look for a good verse with which to respond, might be criticized and receive negativecommentsorbe given abad “name”(reputation)by theaudience.
The story line of this love song duet is about an encounter between two women and two men who meet each other at an institutional flirting event. On the one hand, the men and women both express the same shy but joyful emotions in attending iut fub occasions.
23 On the other hand, they tease themselves and their partners about the dialectical relationship between marriage and extra-marital flirtation. Finally, they express their own solitary sentiments and lonely emotions. Expanding from the story line, there are four thematic emphases in the song: “marriage,” “iut fub,” “two kinds of relationships between marriage and iut fub,”and “individualsentiments.”Theseform theaestheticand sentimental dimensions of marriage and flirtation for the Hmub.
In this paper I pay special attention on the singing of love songs which reveals the often entangled relationship between marriage and flirting in Hmub society. The love song duets address the autonomous nature of marriage and flirting as well as the reluctance of men and some women to make a total commitment to their marriage.
Clearly, many Hmub want to engage in some sort of romantic play which serves to validate their own desirability. This intention is not without its problems as it may result in fostering conflicting relationships between individuals and someone else’s spouse. Thesethemesareevidentin thefollowing loveduet:“Peoplewho arethinking ofeach other come to rest in the middle, my cross cousin. The girls want to sit down and talk with the boys, so they rest in the middle. No matter it is true or not, we will say the boys have wives. If you have wives, boys, then go home to take care of them. No matter it is false or not, we will say the boys have wives. Go home and separate from your wives.
Then wetwo willbewilling to accompany both ofyou.”
In contrast to the previous themes, other love song verses highlight the separation between marriage and flirting. The female singers sing one of the two verses as follows:
“Theboysare like‘words.’Theboysand thegirlsaretalking and singing togetherlike ducks playing joyfully in the water. We do not know why we are sitting next to you all
24 the time. We do not know why we are accompanying husbands of others.”While the male singers would sing “Thegirlsaregood-looking and speak well, but with two hearts.
Like the good field grows millet twice, yearly. One heart accompanies their husbands;
anotherheartaccompaniesus”.Alltheversesvividly show thesamedialecticalrelations between marriage and flirting. Using rhetorical strategies to create contrasting and dramatic metaphorical expressions, the verses uncover the hidden, fluid, conflicting, and dialectical features of marriage and institutionalized flirtation, both poetically and symbolically.