Here is a remarkable account of a highly unusual kinship system of a Tibeto-Burmese Buddhist people:

Among the Na, a tribal people hidden away in the Yongning hills of Yunnan province in southern China and the subject of the French-trained Chinese anthropologist Cai Hua’s provocative new monograph, there is no marriage, in fact or word. Mothers exist, as do children, but there are no dads. Sexual intercourse takes place between casual, opportunistic lovers, who develop no broader, more enduring relations to one another. The man “visits,” usually furtively, the woman at her home in the middle of the night as impulse and opportunity appear, which they do with great regularity. Almost everyone of either sex has multiple partners, serially or simultaneously; simultaneously usually two or three, serially as many as a hundred or two. There are no nuclear families, no in-laws, no stepchildren. Brothers and sisters, usually several of each, reside together, along with perhaps a half-dozen of their nearer maternal relatives, from birth to death under one roof—making a living, keeping a household, and raising the sisters’ children.

The incest taboo is of such intensity that not only may one not sleep with opposite sex members of one’s own household, one cannot even allude to sexual matters in their presence. One may not curse where they can hear, or sit with them in the same row at the movies, lest an emotional scene appear on the screen. As paternity is socially unrecognized, and for the most part uncertain, fathers may happen, now and again, to sleep with daughters. A man is free to sleep with his mother’s brother’s daughter, who is not considered any kind of relative, not even a “cousin.” There is no word for bastard, none for promiscuity, none for infidelity; none, for that matter, for incest, so unthinkable is it …

Obviously, this is an interesting place for an anthropologist—especially for an anthropologist brought up on that King Charles’s head of his profession, “kinship theory.”

There are two major variants of such theory, “descent theory” and “alliance theory,” and the Na, Hua says, fit neither of them. In the first, associated with the name of the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and his followers, the “nuclear,” “basic,” or “elementary” family—a man, his wife, and their children—”founded as it is on natural requirements,” is universal, and “forms the hard core around which any social organization revolves.” The relationship between parents and children, “filiation,” is critical, and out of it are developed various “jural,” that is, normative, rules of descent which group certain sets of relatives together against others: lineages, clans, kindreds, and the like. “Families can be compared to threads which it is the task of nature to warp in order that the social fabric can develop.”

In the alliance model, deriving in the main from the French anthropologist, and Hua’s mentor, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “the institutionalized exchange of women” between families “by the alliance of marriage [is taken] to be the central point of kinship.” The universality of the incest taboo, “a natural phenomenon,” necessitates marriage and the creation of the “transversal [that is, affinal or ‘in-law’] networks of alliances [that] engender all social organization.”

Since the Na have no matrimonial relationship they falsify both theories. They neither form elementary families out of which a filiative social fabric can be spun, nor, though they have a variety of the incest taboo (an odd variety, in that with its father-daughter twist it does not exclude all primary relatives), do they form twined and expandable affinal networks, or indeed any networks of “in-laws” at all. “From now on,” Hua proclaims at the end of his book, “marriage can no longer be considered the only possible institutionalized mode of sexual behavior.” The Na “visit” demonstrates that

Marriage, affinity, alliance of marriage, family, [usually considered] essential to anthropology,…seem absent from this culture. The Na case attests to the fact that marriage and the family (as well as the Oedipus complex) can no longer be considered universal, neither logically nor historically.

<snip, snip — lots of interesting details and facts but which still leave out some significant questions.>

[A great deal of coercion, punishments, denial of rations, incentives, etc. by the dominant Han Chinese for many generations did not manage to get the Na to abandon their unusual matrilineal system. Finally, some “educational” approaches are “working”]. In China, as elsewhere, it is not licentiousness that powers most fear. Nor even immorality. It is difference.

Read more here (purchase required). Here is the Amazon page of A Society Without Fathers or Husbands. More pages/reviews: page1, page2, page3.