Paper short abstract:

This paper examines expressions and implications of male-centered biases at a Mosuo Heritage Museum in southwestern China. Despite the indigenous curators' good intention, their masculine gaze embodied and reproduced emerging patriarchal ideas in the Mosuo's traditionally matrilineal society.

Paper long abstract:

The Mosuo Heritage Museum sought to tell an authentic story of Mosuo (Na) people, an indigenous population of about 40,000 people of Tibeto-Burmese descent in southwestern China. The museum was the brainchild of indigenous curators Dujie and Archei, who for almost two decades travelled around their native Lugu Lake to collect indigenous artefacts and knowledge. Inspired by a "cultural heritage fever" (Blumenfield and Silverman 2013) that swept across China in the early 2000s, the two cultural enthusiasts wanted to do their part in preserving and promoting their endangered culture. Today, the museum stood as a cultural hub and a popular destination for tourists, anthropologists, and Mosuo schoolchildren who sought to learn about Mosuo heritage from indigenous perspective.

Based on my 2023 visit to the recently revitalized museum and conversations with curators and visitors, this paper examines how the collection that Dujie and Archie curated embodied and promoted a masculinized version of Mosuo history and tradition. Their good intention to tell the Mosuo story from their own observation and experience unwittingly cast a patriarchal gaze onto a narrative flow that ended up sidelining the Mosuo's proud matrilineal culture and elevating the role that men traditionally played - and continued to play - in Mosuo family and society. In addition to presenting evidences of this masculine bias in the museum, this paper analyzes the implications of this museum in shaping social norms, gender ideals, and the Mosuo's integration into China's socioeconomy that was largely dominated by patrilineal Han Chinese.