Culture that makes me nervous the mosuo culture research paper examples

As an individual of Hispanic decent, there are some cultures that will by no doubt give me a culture shock. I understand that in most cases when we travel abroad or meet people of differing cultures, there is a preponderance that we will lose the familiar signs that we commonly seen in our culture. Truly, some of the cultures unfamiliar to us will indubitably make us nervous. I first heard about the Mosuo people of China while watching a documentary that highlighted their strange way of marriage that the significant role that women play inputting the families together. The Mosuo is an ethnic group in rural china residing around to the Lugu Lake near the border of China and Tibet.
As was highlighted in the documentary, the Mosuo people are famous for what many authors refer to as the “ walking marriages”. Kolas (2008) asserts that the Mosuo society is a matriarchal society that is characterized by an accepted form of marriage in which women are allowed to choose their spouses. Ideally men have no say in the choice of their companions; women have the right to end a relationship with a man at any time. Anecdotally, women have their own houses in which they are supposed to meet with their “ husbands” in a marriage that only holds during the night as the men are supposed to leave the houses of their wives before dawn (Kolas, 2008; Hamilton, Hines, Jorgensen, Martin& Talamini, 1999). Also notable is the fact that the marriages are not bound by any legal law. In this HIV pandemic period, watching the documentary only served to heighten my fears about the preponderance of HIV and related diseases in this community that seemingly has no control for sexuality.
An in-depth research about the Mosuo culture led me to the realization that the culture, even though extremely weird to any outsider, is safe in their own context. Admittedly, we live in a society characterized by ramspant spread of HIV despite the desperate measures taken by several governments to promote HIV awareness. Notably, several studies have been carried out in a bid to ascertain whether the rate of spread of HIV among the Mosuo people is somewhere near the rate of spread of the same viral disease in the outside world. According to the findings by the researchers, most of the Mosuo people interviewed refuted the existence of HIV amongst them (Stacey, 2011). As Stacey (2011) further contends, HIV is considered an outsider disease in the Mosuo society. However, there is a paucity of research articles revealing the exact statistics about the number of Mosuo people infected with HIV. My research also revealed some more intriguing fact about the Mosuo people. For instance, I came to the realization that the families in the Mosuo society are headed by women and families are descriptively very united (Hamilton et. al., 1999).
Concisely, the Mosuo people have one of the strangest cultures in the world. Women in the Mosuo society reserve the right to choose their spouses, and while some refer to get married, majority prefer to have only nighttime lovers. The women have their own houses where they are supposed to meet with their partners. With such a strange culture, it is logical to suspect that HIV is widespread among these people. However, by researching on the Mosuo culture, it has become apparent that HIV might not be widespread amongst them like I suspected. Professedly, such a realization will go a long way in determining the way I interact with people from different cultural backgrounds- I have realized that stereo types and preconception we form about other cultures might not always be true.

References

Hamilton, M., Hines, S., Jorgensen, K., Martin, S. & Talamini, M. (1999). What a Woman: A Financial Planning Guide for the Newly Independent. Los Angeles, CA: Silver Lake Pub.
Kolas, A. (2008). Tourism and Tibetan Culture in Transition: A place called Shangrila. New York, NY: Routledge.
Stacey, J (2011). Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China. New York, NY: New York University Press.