Fangf Bil is a Hmub village perched high on a hillside on the upper reaches of the Qingshuijiang River. It forms part of the northern subgroup of the Hmub in Guizhou.18 Fangf Bil is part of Fanzao Township, Taijiang County, southeastern Guizhou Self-Governing District, Guizhou Province. The people in this village call themselves Hmub, which is cognate with Hmong. The village is composed of over 330 households and has
15Mainardi, P., Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, p.213.
16Mainardi, P., Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, p.213.
17Mainardi, P., Husbands, Wives, and Lovers.
18Yang, T. S., Renqun Daima de Lishi Ghocheng--Yi Miaozu Zuming Wei Li (The Historical Process of Signs in Human Groups: the Case of Hmong Nationality Names) (Guiyang: Guizhou Renmin Chuban She, 1998), p. 99.
8 a population of almost 1,500 persons. It is divided into eleven hamlets (vangf), whose respective names refer to some nearby geographic feature.
The residents of any single hamlet will generally be the agnatic descendants of a lineage sub-segment and share a common Han Chinese surname. The naming system is patronymic.Regardless of gender, aperson’snameiscomposed ofhisorhername preceded by hisorherfather’sname,thefather’snamebeing preceded by hisorfather’s name in turn. Han Chinese surnames appear to have come into use only in the eighteenth century, with the intrusion of the Chinese State. Han Chinese surnames are seldom heard in everyday Hmub discourse, but they accord with the patrilineal spirit of Fangf Bil naming practices.
The eleven hamlets of Fangf Bil village are organized into five patrilineal marriage groups. Marriage within a marriage group is forbidden. The five marriage groups have the five Han Chinese surnames of Zhang, Tang, Wan, Yang and Tai. However, the correspondence between the Chinese surnames and the marriage groups is not absolute.
Hamlets, surnames and patrilineal marriage groups are all organized, one way or another, around ancestor descent groups. These groups are generally localized residentially and share a common male ancestor, corporate ancestral rites and corporate agricultural land.
The surnames and hamlets roughly coincide with the marriage groups, but it is only the marriage groups that correspond directly with ancestor descent groups.
This paper is based on my long term fieldwork in Fangf Bil village. It was started with a pre-field summer trip in 1997, followed by a main fieldwork for my dissertation from November of 1998 to February of 2000, and an additional summer field trip in 2004, I have conducted a village based ethnographical research related to marriage and flirting
9 on the Hmub for more than 20 months. Combining with the anthropological methods of participant observation, in-depth interview and long term residence in the village, I attempted to explore the interplay between personal emotions (erotic, romantic, or flirtatious feelings) and social institutions (marriage and courtship). At the beginning of my fieldwork, I focused on the studying of the social structure of the Hmub village. I did a census of more than 300 households and drew up the pedigrees and genealogical records for each family as discovered through semi-structured interviews.19Additionally, I collected the kinship terms employed by native speakers and recorded the actual use of the terminology in both everyday and ritualized settings. This datum outlining of the social networks of the Hmub village enabled me to understand the personal relationships between families and between individuals. It is important to describe the marital ideals provided by my informants, as well as the reality of marriage, to see where they converge and where they differ in detail.
Another focus of this paper was the private domain of sentiments. By examining how the Hmub behaved in institutional flirting settings as well as analyzing their love songs,Iwasableto enterinto theemotionalworld ofthe “young people”(vangt).20 But this entailed a problem: I was already the young mother of two sons when I carried out the research project for my Ph.D. dissertation. For any woman in the village to be a mothermeantshewould bedefined as“old”(lok) and, therefore, excluded from most institutional flirting activities.However,thevillagersstillregarded meas“ayoung girl”, despite my actual social status as defined by their conventions. One of the reasons was
19Pedigree is recording basic demographic data (such as name, age, marriage, birth) of the members of each household.
Genealogical records express consanguine and affine relations among households, family, and lineages.
20The “young people”with quotation mark in thispaperindicatesthatthepeopleinvolved in courtship arenotalways young people in its strict sense; especially on the occasions of festival courtship activities and singing antiphonal songs, there are lots of old people participating in them.
10 probably because of my dress, which was no different from the local unmarried girls.21 Wearing ayouth’sclothing combined with being an outsider, plus being a “Han Chinese”
doctoral student from Taiwan enabled me to participate in and observe the young peoples’flirting interactions and daily life. The Fangf Bil villagers were accustomed in their encounter with local Han Chinese but it was still a fresh experience for most of them that I, a Taiwanese female graduate, was living in the village with them for more than one and half years continually. Besides asking me about the purpose of my research, they especially liked to ask me about political, economical, cultural, and everyday issues with regards to Taiwan when I had opportunities to chat with them.
Institutionalized flirting activities can take in the forms either of get-togethers or of
“talking love”throughoutthenightunderneath ayoung woman’swindow.Although I participated directly in many get-togethers, I was able listen to but not directly observe them during their conversations. I was able to interview the girls later as to what was exchanged. Flirting activities in the village can be open, conveying some features of ritualized performance, but they can also be very private and personal encounters.
Without the girls accompanying me during fieldwork and their willingness to let me sharein their“romantic” orflirtatiousemotionsand experiences,Iwould nothavebeen able to understand the content and contextual value of the institutionalized flirtation between individuals.
During my fieldwork, I lived in the home of an unmarried girl. I was able to develop a close fictive relationship with her as evident that we easily and readily called each other sister. In my fieldwork, this girl accompanied me day and night, which enable me to
21The unmarried young women wear trousers and coats bought from the outside, usually blouses or sportswear in summer and woolen sweaters in winter.
11 sharefrom her,attimes,herfriend’sexperiences,moodsand viewson marriage and feelings about men.
At Khait ( “Getting Married”)
The primary structural factors that shape long term (extramarital) flirting are:
bilateral cross-cousin marriage, village endogamy, and duo-local post-marital residence.
The terminological system of this village is similar to the Dravidian-type structure of the kinship terminology in conjunction with the ideal and practice of prescriptive cross-cousin marriage. In terms of classificatory kin relations, most women in Fangf Bil still marry either their classificatory matrilateral or patrilateral cross cousins: that is, either marriages of father’s sister’s daughter with mother’s brother’s son (FZD/MBS) or mother’s brother’s daughter with father’s sister’s son (MBD/FZS) occur.22Nevertheless, the practice of cross-cousin marriage is still related to how kin are classified in Fangf Bil, a community that clearly distinguishes between near and distant kin. Thus bilateral cross-cousin marriage is not actually father’s sister’s son (FZS) or mother’s brother’s son (MBS), but rather between members of patrilineal descent groups who are related to one another. These are either as classificatory patrilateral cross cousin (FZHBS, FZHFBSS, or FZHFFBSSS), who are equated terminologically with the father’s sister’s son (FZS), or as classificatory matrilateral cross cousin (MFBSS, or MFFBSSS), who are equated terminologically with the mother’s brother’s son (MBS). This means there are classificatory FZD/MBS and classificatory MBD/FZS marriages. Parallel with the marriage rule, the binary organizations of the groups of Fangf Bil are given classificatory
22FZD meansfather’ssister’sdaughter;MBS,mother’sbrother’sson;MBD,mother’sbrother’sdaughter;FZS,father’s sister’sson.Hereafter,Ifollow thekin abbreviations:F=father,M=mother,B=brother,Z=sister, G=sibling, E=spouse, S=son, D=daughter, P=parent, C=child, e=elder, y=younger, ms=man speaker, ws=woman speaker, etc.
Barnard, A. and A. Good, Research Practices in the Study of Kinship. (London: Academia Press, 1984), p. 4.
12 reality in the distinction between gad ghat (agnates,literally “hosts” or“us”)and khait (affines,literally “guests”).Marriage isprohibited between gad ghat (or simply ghat), but permitted with khait. The centrality of the relationships between ghat and khait in Fangf Bil village is indicative of the importance of kinship in the village social process.
Village endogamy is also important in exploring the practice of cross cousin marriage in the village. The Chang Family and Tang Family marriage groups have a combined population of over 90 percentofFangfBil’stotalpopulation.Theratio of intermarriages between the two marriage groups far exceeds marriages outside of the village. The six hamlets of the two marriage groups depend on one another for the vast majority of their wives. In short, the two groups seem to constitute something approaching a categorically binary structure. Ultimately, most marriages take place within the village through a system of classificatory bilateral cross cousin marriage.
Duo-local post-marital residence (or delayed transferred marriage) is the third institutional feature to assist the institutionalization of long-term flirtation. Generally, a bride in a Hmub village does not live with the groom after the wedding ceremony but immediately return to stay with her natal kin. This custom of duo-local residence is called niangt zix (literally “sitting athomeorstaying athome”).Thewifevisitsthe husband’shouseonly on festivaldaysorto assistin thefarm work ofherhusband’s family until their first child is born. During this period the wife still wears the garments of an unmarried woman. Whether doing farm work in the daytime or engaging in flirting activities in the evening, the wife spends most of her time with other unmarried women or other married womenwho aresimilarly “staying ather own natal parent’s home.”23
23They consider themselves classificatory sisters.
13 During the duo-local period, both wife and husband can freely attend their own flirting activities separately. The wife still can talk about love or joke along with other boys who flirt with her by her bedroom window in the evening when she is staying at her own parents’home (see thefollowing paragraph formoredetailsofinstitutionalized flirting activities). Her personal leisure time and individual feelings at engaging in such extramarital flirting will not come to an end until she has become a mother and begins to live regularly with her husband. In the Hmub village, most wives will become mothers one or two years after their marriage. Only a few are still living in their natal homes more than “three, four or five years”24after marriage. No matter how old a wife or husband becomes, if they have not yet had children, they will continue to be considered
“young”women or bachelors, and their marital status will remain vague, especially in regard to long term flirting activities.
In general, the combination of prescriptive cross-cousin marriage with village endogamy continually creates a small world, generation after generation, which means that the Hmub prefer to form and maintain their social world by production and reproduction within one village, ideologically and sociologically. However, such cohesive social constraint of intra-village affinal alliance leaves a place for duo-local residence, niangt zix, which demonstrates the fluidity between flirting and marriage. As described earlier, duo-local residence provides the opportunity for the married men and women to control their extramarital flirting activity. This is an important characteristic in addition to the collective and institutional aspects of the cross cousin marriage of the Hmub. The fluidity of the flirting will be discussed with more details later.
24This is a Hmub idiom which means a couple of years.
14 Besides the institutional aspect and the prescribed rules, however, we also need to see Hmub marriage from the perspective of the social actors. Marriages in Fangf Bil occur after a brief courtship, and may or may not involve romantic love. They can be either public marriages (ghaif zix bat mongf,literally “to besentaway from homeby the bride’s parents”) or elopements (at dlius mongf, literally “to go away secretly”).25 Nowadays, most marriages are decided by the young people themselves, whether public marriages or elopements. To become socially recognized as Hmub adults, they are expected to be married and have children. Once the wife and the husband have had their own first child, they will begin to live together. The nuclear family, consisting of a couple and their unmarried children in one household, is the most common form in a Hmub village.
Sharing ideas, knowledge, feelings and cooperation in both the production of resources and reproduction are obvious aspects of the daily life of each married couple.
Couples talk to each other often at home, especially during meals. They discuss the division of their farm work and housework, exchange ideas on how to solve family problems and bring up children, and share news, jokes, rumors, scandals or arguments
25The two kinds of marriages show their differences in certain ways. Almost all the public marriages are arranged marriages that take the form of prescriptive cross-cousin marriage with village endogamy, and they have a more complicated wedding ceremony.Otherritualsareinvolved in publicmarriages.First,thebride’sfamily willapproveof her leaving by undertaking a ceremony involving the slaughter of a chicken. She may leave if the eyes of a chicken killed by thegroom orthebride’sbrothersareopen. Another ritual involves a ceremonial farewell in which the bride shares a cup of wine with her brothers to express farewell. After these rituals are performed, the bride leaves her family’shouse.Wearing formalHmub clothes and silver ornaments, the bride in a public marriage departs for her groom’shousewith her“parallel” sistersin thedaytime.Elopements,on theotherhand,aremuch simpler,and lack the rituals of the public marriages. Elopements violate village endogamy and are finalized when the bride, wearing a dress bought from the market (ux diuf,literally “theHan dress”),crossthethreshold ofthehousealonewith hergroom in the middle of the night. Such marriagesoccurwithoutherfamily’sconsentorknowledge. Elopements of the Hmub are not necessarily related to romantic love. However, we may consider “elopement from the perspective of a bride’s weighing the uncertainties and special ambivalence of an alternative cognatic marriage against the certainties and general ambivalence of a restricted marriage. Moreover, elopements make intelligible Miao (Hmub) ambivalence about the collective marital ideal and individuality (Chien 2005).
Chien, M., “Miao Elopement in Eastern Guizhou: Ambivalent Collective and Individual.”Taiwan Journal of Anthropology. Vol. 3, No. 1 (2005), pp. 49-86.
15 which are circulating among the other villagers. Whenever I visited or stayed in a household I often heard couples chatting, but sometimes I heard them quarrelling or fighting. Interactions between spouses inside their own home seem normal. But what impressed me strongly was the their indifference toward one another once outside their house.
The spouses are expected to walk out separately, ideally with their same-sex relatives, whether they are going to do farm work, engage in ritual activities, or visit relatives. A married couple walking together around the village is considered impolite and inappropriate behavior. Yet, when they are beyond the public’s gaze, the Hmub actually seek out private encounters that allow them to engage in emotionally satisfying and intensely intimate interactions with members of the opposite sex. This is the Hmub institutionalized extra-marital flirting.