Few Hmong know for long the close ties of the nuclear family as an isolated unit. As soon as a son marries and brings his wife to live in his father's house, the family becomes an extended household. Firstly, therefore, we have a nuclear family, then the male siblings bring in their wives and children under the same roof, giving the fullest expression to their relationship in the form of the extended household. This cluster of classificatory brothers may later separate into different households; but they, together with their spouses and offspring, can become a lineage. Lineal ties will be remembered. If it is forgotten, the sharing of common ancestral rituals will be evoked in reckoning the lineage membership with other people.
For the Hmong, therefore, a lineage is a group of cognates and their spouses around an agnatic core. The brotherhood group and the father who created it, form the core of the lineage with membership spanning across all male descendants, their wives and all unmarried daughters. The relationship of wives in the lineage to one another is because of their marriage to the agnatic core of a common patrilineal line.
Daughters who marry out of their group of origin are seen as belonging to the lineage of their husbands. Even if some of them may become divorced or widowed and return to live with their families of birth, their physical presence does not entitle them to re-enter the spiritual world of the parents' lineage. Under these circumstances, they must seek to re-marry in order not to become "lost souls" after death, unless they have sons in whose lineage they are included as ancestors. All females born into the group are included initially, but are later excluded when they marry because marriages are exogamous to the clan and they must pass over to the lineage of their husbands or ex-husbands in the case of widows and divorcees.
Thus, it can be seen that households with only female children (whether all married or not) will contribute nothing to the perpetuation of a lineage, since only men are entrusted with the performance of ancestor worship rituals through which the lineage is remembered and perpetuated. So long as there are male descendants who adhere to the cult of ancestors, the lineage will survive. Hence, there is a strong desire by Hmong parents to have sons who will offer sacrifices to the ancestral spirits and maintain the family line. The desire to have sons is, therefore, dictated by a religious sanction which entrusts them with the physical as well as spiritual care of their parents.
Daughters, on the other hand, are referred to as "other people's women", and are expected to marry and to belong to strangers from outside their own group of birth. The most that can be hoped from female offspring is their contributions to the economic activities of their families until their marriage. The Hmong usually justify the practice of bride-wealth by saying that a bride represents a valuable economic asset in terms of her contributions to physical work in her parents' swiddens, but more importantly she is a liability from birth in the sense that her parents bring her up at a cost to them only to lose her to her husband. For these reasons, it is not uncommon to find that the more industrious a daughter is, the higher her bride-price which some parents also call a "nurturing charge".
A spinster is considered ominous to the life and the interests of a lineage. Upon her death, her funeral will be as brief as possible. This is to prevent her soul from staying too long among the living members of her consanguinal kin group, since it could lead to the existence of other spinster descendants. Before her burial, the husband of her father's eldest sister - Maum phauj (mau pau) - may be invited to cast away her spell from the group so that she will not be born again into spinsterhood or influence others to fall under this condition.
Although male offsprings are desired and given greater spiritual significance, this does not mean that daughters are not given an important place in parental care and affection, or that spinster relatives will not be worshipped after death. Nevertheless, couples without sons may seek to adopt them or may compromise their monogamy by allowing the husband to marry a second wife in the hope that she will bear him male offsprings to take care of the parents during old age, or to give them offsprings after death.
However great the aspiration for male descendants may be, it does not necessarily lead all parents to prefer sons over daughters in practice. In cases where the sons are incapable or unwilling to contribute to the parental household, parents may even care more about their daughters and sons-in-law than their own sons. Although Hmong are normally attached to members of their lineage and value its spiritual protection, these concepts are not absolutely compelling. This occurs, for example, when a married man fails to live in harmony with his own lineage members or wishes to exploit resources elsewhere. A man who cannot pay the bride- wealth of his wife may also resort to patriuxorilocal residence to work off the debt, by giving service to his relatives-in-law.
Such moves take place only in extreme circumstances, as they are regarded as a betrayed of one's own lineal group, a lack of filial responsibility towards the man's parents and male relatives in moving away from them, or an indication of discord in the extended household or lineage concerned. A married Hmong who joins his father-in-law is spiritually on his own, despite all the practical assistance he gets from his own ancestral ceremonies and revere his own ancestors, since he and his family members can never be admitted or adopted into the cult of his wife's family of origin.
Strictly speaking, a man should not live with his wife's consanguinal kin group. The observation of different ancestral rites in the same house if forbidden in Hmong society. The problem cannot be resolved by the adoption of affinal ancestors, because this necessitates the son-in-law changing his clan to that of his wife, which is a violation against the practice of clan exogamy in marriage and a defiance of the incest taboo. A Hmong who resides patriuxorilocally, therefore, will have to build his own house separately from that of his father-in-law, since in addition to the rules regarding clan and ritual differentiation, he would anger the father- in-law's house spirits by having sex with his wife in her parental house.
Patriuxorilocal residence is often met with disapproval. Those practising it are seen as inferior individuals who submit to the wishes of their wives and affinal relatives rather than to those of their lineal relatives to whom their loyalty should go in the first instance. Even with young couples who remain in their father-in- law's settlements to work off the bride-price, their inability to pay it at a wedding puts them in an economically lower position than those who can afford to free themselves of such a bondage. The fact that such a residential pattern is rare indicates that it is socially disapproved, and that patrivirilocal residence is the preferred practice and rule. It is preferred because it allows the continuation of lineage development under the guidance and protection of one's kin group for the interests of its members.
Whether a married couple lives among the husband's lineage or with that from which the wife comes, they still have to maintain ancestral rites of the man's lineage to which they both now belong. The exception is married brothers who live together in an extended household where it is sufficient for the household head to hold these rites on behalf of all members. Among the Hmong, a lineage can be distinguished from other social groupings such as a sub-clan or clan by the number of common ancestors worshipped by various households. All dead members of a consanguinal group are invoked by name starting with the highest down to the lowest generation during such occasions as New Year, wedding, christening, a new harvest of rice and corn, and family feasts involving the killing of a chicken or pig. Each generation of dead kin, as fas as can be recalled, are asked to partake in these important events in return for their protection of the well-being and overall fortune of the household.
These offerings are further extended to all local spirits as well as the lost souls of people who dies without being discovered and given proper funeral rites. This means that all departed blood relatives (except for stillborns and small babies who dies without a funeral) are included in the invocation in recognition of their position in the lineage and their need to be given offerings. However, only people with parental status are "worshipped" in the sense that only their spirits are feared and revered, because they can bring harm to the living descendants. Spirits of young people or babies are seen to be harmless but are still in need of sacrifices to avoid poverty and hunger in the other world.
Generally speaking, all male household heads are to make offerings to all the spirits of their dead relatives. Usually, the closer the blood relations between the living, the more common the number of dead agnates invoked for offerings by them. In such invocations, a ritual performed begins with the most distant ancestors of the household, followed by each generation of dead relatives on to the lowest in the line. Only included in these offerings are those dead who were in primary and secondary-degree relationships. Beyond this range, relatives of lesser age status may be omitted as they are in any case taken care of by their immediate kin group and family heads. Some households within the lineage may have moved to other villages or live a long way from others; and with distance over time and space, their new born children will be unknown to those who do not settle close to them. Thus, not all dead or living members of a group can be known and included in the group's lineage. Moreover, the Hmong rely exclusively on memorizing the names of all dead relatives, and it is possible and even necessary to exclude or forget some of them from an already long and complex incantation. This is the case with most of the big lineages.
Mutual dependence exists between the living themselves through their common ancestors, and between the dead and their living descendants through the bond of blood relationships across the generations. The living members of a lineage are to observe the same ancestral rituals without deviating from the group's norms, and to provide mutual help to each other by virtue of their kinship bonds. To the dead, they have to pay respect through commemoration and sacrificial ceremonies, to provide their spirits in the other world with food and paper money, and to remember them during feasts and harvests. On their part, the dead relatives will protect the living from misfortune, but will bring harm or sickness if they are neglected or spurned by their descendants.
It may appear to non-believers that this structuring of social relations through the Hmong's practice of ancestor-worship is based on a false conception of life and death. But, such a practice and its rituals give incentives to those who take part in them to have a sense of dependence on their ancestors and to commemorate them for having given them their life, while they are spurred on to bring up their descendants to whom they will one day also become revered ancestors. It is this sense of duty to the dead as well as the living that creates a direct association between a Hmong's religion and his social structure, particularly his lineage.
Ancestral rites are symbols which express, regulate, maintain and transmit this association from one generation to another. Thus, rites renew and strengthen group sentiment, thereby reinforcing lineage solidarity and inspiring members to carry out their duties to the living, the dead and those yet to be born. These rites differ from one lineage or clan to another.
Within a lineage, there is a lineage head who is always man. He assumes major responsibilities over his lineage, and is usually its oldest living descendant. This lineage leader is called "tus coj plaub ( chor plao)" or literally "trouble bearer", and "tus coj dab ( tu chor da)" or "ceremonial bearer" for the group. He may be, but not always, village headman who is formally appointed or elected for a whole village or a group of villages which often have many lineage or informal leaders for various kin groups within a village complex.
All household members of a lineage are not necessary reside in the same settlement at all times, but can be found living in several villages separated by great distance. This dispersion has increase recently as many Hmong have settled in many western countries following the end of the Indochina War in 1975. After a few generations of such dispersion, as experienced by the Hmong in Laos and Thailand, these lineage members may lose track of one another. Descendants of those who join uxorial relatives may gradually be unable to remember the original members of their kin group, forcing them to adopt the slightly different ritual practices of neighbouring sub-clan in place of their own.
The lineage, like the Hmong household, is open to division and leadership take-over, as the generation levels increase over time and as its membership disperse in space. To be preserved in a cohesive group worshipping the same set of ancestors, members of a lineage must remain together or be separated for a short time. Long- distance migration often divides the group, although some descendants may later reunite into a single settlement. However, unless the original ancestors and rituals are still remembered, they may form merely a sub-clan rather than a lineage.
We have noted that for a lineage, its members are distinguished by their sharing the same ancestral spirits traced to a common original male founder. In Hmong language, they have the same "parental spirits" to honour in ceremonies and to revere. There is, however, membership of more inclusive groups such as the clan or subclan. When a Hmong meets another fellow Hmong for the first time, their immediate concern is usually to establish their clan identities before they are able to relate to each other. If they are not of the same clan, then a further question may be asked whether their wives come from the same clan so that relationship can be made through them. If the wives are also of different clans, then the relationships will be established on a broader basis, namely that they are both Hmong.
However, if two Hmong men who meet each other for the first time find that they belong to the same clan through the sharing of a common surname, the next question is to discover the sub-clan to which each belongs. This is done by inquiring whether both perform ancestral rites in the same manner, and whether the graves of the two parties are similar in construction. If membership of the same sub-clan is confirmed, they may try to learn whether they descend from the same known ancestor and, thus, belong to the same lineage. It is simple enough to establish which clan one comes from when one's surname is known.
It is difficult to know how many clans all Hmong groups have, because groups such as the Green Hmong share some clan names with the White Hmong but also have other clan names of their own. The most common clans with the White Hmong are Lee, Yang, Vang, Thao, Mua, Haw, Xiong, Lau and Vu. The Green Hmong have, in addition, such clan names as Tang, Chang, Kew, Kong, Klu, Zang Tchai, Chao and Ka.
Many Hmong groups share the same legend about the origin of clans. They resulted from the union of a brother with his sister, after the earth became flooded and everyone else had died. God or Yaw Sau (also known as Ntzew Nyong) ordained that they be marries because there were no other people left on earth; but when a baby was born to them, it did not have any human features. Yaw Sau told the parents to cut the baby up into pieces, and throw each piece to a different place. Next morning, they got up and discovered smoke coming out of huts which stood where their son's divided remains fell. In each hut was found a married couple with a different surname. These original couples are the mythical ancestors of the various Hmong clans, although between them and the current stage of Hmong social evolution there is virtually nothing in Hmong legends to inform us of their many different generations of descendants.
Chinese records, however, imply that Hmong clan names are borrowed from Chinese family names presumably for registration of Chinese officials and to raise the Hmong's social position from the "state of 'sheng', raw or wild into that of 'shu' or 'ripe'. Such speculation is based on accounts which date from the sixteenth century stating that the Miao (who were not necessarily Hmong) had no family names and used only personal names. They gradually adopted surnames when some of their leaders were appointed as "t'u szu" to oversee their followers for the Chinese governors to whom many Hmong had submitted themselves after years of resistance. These "t'u szu", if of tribal origin, had to present their genealogies for official records like most Chinese, and this might have prompted others to follow them, thereby giving later generations the present Hmong clans and lineages which are akin to those of the Chinese. It is not known how much cultural borrowing has occurred between the two groups, although some Hmong rituals are in Chinese.
Whatever might have been the origin of the Hmong clan system, it is the main basis on which the people recognise one another as kin or non-kin. It unites then into organised kinship groups, and at the same time it divides them along mutually exclusive patrilineal lines, except for the links maintained through the wives. If a man is of a particular clan, he will be welcomed into the house of another person belonging to the same clan even if they may have never met or known one another before. Their relationship will be closer still if they are also of the same sub-clan. Persons of the same clan or sub-clan without any known blood relationship refer to one another as "relatives" (kwv tij).
A lineage is known as a "cluster of brothers" (ib cuab kwv tij) or "one ceremonial household" (ib tus dab qhuas). The difference can be distinguished further by the fact that members of "ceremonial household" can die and have funerals in one another's house, as there must be "blood ties" traceable to a common ancestor between them. People merely belonging to a clan or sub-clan by virtue of a similar surname cannot be granted this ceremonial privilege. Thus, a man may be welcomed to live with a sub-clan or clan cousin, but should he be dying from an illness he will be removed from the host's house and put under a hastily constructed shelter or in the house of a patrilineal relative.
What this means is that the clan system serves to divide Hmong into different groupings united under various clan names. It proscribes marriage between persons of the same clan and is a focus of group identification for clan members. For a man, the clan makes it possible for him to know which group be belongs to by birth or through adoption, and which woman he can or cannot marry. He can count on other men of his clan to give him assistance in migration or in a crisis, no matter where he may happen to be, especially when away from home and his own blood relatives. Beyond this general function, clan membership will help a person identify the sub-groups or sub-clan and clan with which he can maintain closer ties. Since members of a clan are only presumed to descend from a common ancestor without genealogical links between them, their bond of mutual obligations will not be as close as that between members of a sub-clan.
In Hmong social structure, a sub-clan is usually identified through the sharing of identical sets of ancestral rituals or ceremonies and identical grave types between members of the same surname.
Of the major religious rituals, the ones most often used by the Hmong to identify sub-clans are the "door spirit ceremony" (dab roog) and the "ox spirit ceremony" (nyuj dab). For the door ceremony, a piglet is offered every one to two years by the head of a family to the spirit of the household door to ask its protection for the family's domestic animals. The ox ceremony is performed at irregular intervals of between two to ten years, depending on a household's ancestral needs. It involves the killing of an ox as offering to the dead father or mother of the household head, and sometimes to his grandparents or great-grandparents. Some sub-clans hold the ox ceremony only for the dead parents of a household head, while other sub-clans have to deal with the demands of ancestors one or two generations above the dead parents. Should a male or female parental spirit need this ox offering, such requirements will be transmitted to the living descendants through an illness in the family and revealed through divination by a shaman.
These two ceremonies are used as a yardstick to differentiate sub-clans because the number of plates into which the various cooked portions of the pig (door ceremony) or the ox (ox ceremony) are distributed differs from one sub-clan to another within the same surname group.
For the door ceremony, the pork can be divided into five, seven or nine piles; and for the ox ceremony, all parts of the ox can be put as small cuts into one big bowl; 10 big bowls and 5 small bowls; 13 big bowls and 3 small bowls; 30 big and 3 small bowls; or 33 big piles and 3 small bowls. The big bowls of meat are for ancestral spirits and the small plates for the spirits of streams and prominent places surrounding the village of the family holding the ceremony.
If two Hmong discover that they have the same number of plates for both ceremonies, they are said to be of the same sub-clan (through not necessarily of the same lineage).
Some go beyond these rituals to inquire if they build graves for their dead in the same manner. Hmong graves can merely be a mound of earth on which some tree branches are put to protect the corpse from being savaged by wild animals, a mound of earth surrounded by a plaited bamboo fence, or a mound of earth protected by boulders. Each type of grave is strictly observed by each sub-clan, depending on its mortuary tradition. A grave with a simple mound of earth is referred to as a Hmong grave, the one with a bamboo fence is a fences grave, and the one covered with rocks is known as a Chinese grave. Therefore, if a Hmong really wishes to stretch the extent of his kinship ties with other Hmong of the same clan as him, he will ask if they have the same type of grave as his sub-clan or not.
There are other less important criteria for discovering sub-clans, for example, are forbidden to eat animal hearts. Some Lee members cannot eat pancreas, and a group of Xiong people should refrain from consuming dogs.
