Marriages of You

The marriage between You acquires a series of varied forms that prove to be a society in been evolution onlooker.

His families were patrilineales (the heredity was transmitted by paternal line) and patrilocales (the wives were going to live to the houses of his husbands after the marriage). In the epoch before to the Revolution of 1949 the men were directing the familiar matters and the women were subordinated to them.

The marriages were always celebrated by someone of different surname. The parents were giving big importance to the marriage of his children, and often, when these were still children, they had been already compromised. As the marriage was implying important gifts exchanges, sometimes the poor families were practising the wives' exchange, or that they were coordinating that the daughter of a family was a wife of the son of other one, that in turn a daughter was promising to provide for the first family. In other cases grotesque situations were taking place, marrying children with already adult women only to obtain this additional labor for the family.

In other occasions, the husband (or the fiancé) was working several years for the family of the fiancée, to compensate them for the loss of labor that they would suffer after his marriage.

In contrast with this rigid matrimonial structure, the young people You had excessive occasions to go knowing and falling in love, especially across the meetings of antiphonal singings known in his language like "huaer". For them they had so much importance that the winners of these competitions were called kings or queens of the huaer. Unfortunately the relations that were arising thanks to these meetings of singings, rarely could finish in marriage.

Curiously Yan Ruxian (1) mentions a type of relations not based on the economy, but in a free love similar to the marriages azhu of the Moso and the Pumi. Your "wedding is called between with the sky".

This marriage that, according to the description of missis Yan, was always celebrating last day of the lunar year, when the gods did not know what it was spending in the ground. "Any girl, after new clothes put themselves, was turning into married woman, to what it was allowing him to give birth to all the children I would like to have heirs … since then the small age free to support sexual relations and he could go to bed with any man, who generally was going to her house in the night and was leaving in the dawn of the following day … his children were not recognizing him as a father."

The clear parallelisms with the numerously described marriage azhu of Moso (2), he invites to think about the possibility that this type of occasional relations should have been the norm in a wide peoples fan on the borders Chinese Tibetan.

While the existence of these societies matrilineales can make to think about ancient matriarchal kingdoms, the authoress thinks that there are a consequence of the diffusion of the Lamaism in his grounds (also it is well implanted in grounds moso), what would have provoked that numerous males were turning into monks causing a high disparity between the sexes.

(1) Yan Ruxian. - Marriage and family of the minority ethnic groups of China. Editions of Foreign languages. Beijing. 1991
(2) Ceinos Receptacle, Pedro. - Shangrilá. Travel round the Chinese-Tibetan borders. Kapok tree. 2006

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