Marriage and land property: bilateral non-lineal kinship and communal authority of the Lahu on the south- west Yunnan frontier, China1

This paper discusses how a social system based on bilateral and non-hierarchical kinship is able to establish and maintain systems of authority. The Muga Lahu in Yunnan practise a bilateral and non-lineal kinship system based on the gender equality principle, and communal life is also based on equal couples’ kinship networking, bound to non-lineal ties through marriage. The Lahu here never practise matrilineal, patrilineal or cognatic kinship and descent in daily life, but an individual couple is bound to immediate ancestors through the redistribution of cropland property. In communal life, family separation and farmland reorganization are carried out dynamically through the marriages of the younger generation. The flexible kinship group establishes labour-sharing, ritual-participating and intermarriage groups in everyday life. Therefore, the kinship system is closely bound to farmland redistribution and the continuation of families. This bilateral, non-lineal kinship system constitutes a dynamic social institution, but all couples are equal to each other. Due to the lack of authority over the equality of social units such as equal couples, the Lahu communal authority historically comes from superior external powers, such as the religious power linked with religious movements involved in 1 ‘Bilateral non-lineal kinship’ means that the relatives of a married couple are of parallel importance, while there is no clear internal hierarchy among the relatives and no family genealogy can be recorded. This research project was partly funded by the RGC Direct Grant 2007/08 (Project No DAG07/08.HSS05) of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the University Grant Committee-Area of Excellence Scheme: The Historical Anthropology of Chinese Society. An earlier working version of this paper was presented at the IUAS 2009 at Kunming (28–31 July 2009). The author’s special thanks go to Professor Du Shanshan for her longterm encouragement and advice since 1996. Her fundamental research on the gender equality ideal of the Lahu made this study possible. The author’s thanks also go to Professor James Wilkerson for his comments on an earlier version of this paper, and special thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. 496 South East Asia Research the Yunnan–Burma frontier formation since the 1720s. The established Lahu political system was destroyed by the coming of the Qing and the Republic states, because of its anti-Han or anti-state stance in frontier history. It is clear that the superior religious power over the kinship network worked as a means of social mobilization through religious movements, and became the authority source for social cohesion in history, but it has been replaced by state-appointed cadres in current communal life in China. The Lahu case shows that more attention should be paid to the relationships between frontier history, dynamic kinship and social organization among ethnic minorities in Chinese and South East Asian frontier societies.