Quest for Harmony is a field-setting volume for anthropology and Southwest China studies alike, which reveals the mutually enhancing relation between matrilineal ideology and household harmony among the Moso. Drawing on two decades of anthropological fieldwork and a wealth of household surveys, Shih offers a comprehensive treatment of the social institutions of the Moso (written as Mosuo in Chinese), a Tibeto-Burman group of sedentary farmers in Southwest China. He gives an in-depth analysis of the different patterns of sexual union among the Moso, namely: marriage and the more dominant visiting system of relations called “tisese” (“walking back and forth”), which is non-contractual, non-obligatory and non-exclusive. All of this is set against Shih's candid discussion of his own entrance into the socio-cultural milieu of the Moso, just as they were struggling to overthrow the Chinese ethnological label of being living evidence for the “late primitive period” of humanity on the Morganian-Engelsian evolutionary ladder. Shih unpacks this political categorization of the Moso which gave rise to high-profile tourism, while describing who the Moso really are (they call themselves ‘Na’ in their own language) and their contestation of being classed as part of the Naxi nationality in Yunnan Province, in the face of obvious differences between these two groups.

Shih's argument is stimulating and convincing, especially when viewed against his storehouse of unique ethnography. He offers a rich historical background to the Moso in the Introduction and chapters one and two, including an in-depth description of how the Moso chiefdomship was comprised of ethnic Prmi (called Pumi in Chinese) chiefs, and evidence for the ample present-day differences between the Moso and Naxi. In chapter three, Shih gives a detailed and full account of the tisese visiting system of relations, as the dominant institutionalized pattern of sexual union among the Moso. He follows this with a discussion of the less dominant pattern of marriage in chapter four, suggesting that while Moso marriages were historically derived from interaction with the Pumi chiefs, nowadays Moso often prefer marriage in remote highland areas where the distances between households and the difficulties in moving between them render tisese – and the walking back and forth that it entails – less feasible.

Complementing the discussion of Moso kinship in chapter five are the precise charts that Shih gives in chapters four, six and seven, which detail historical changes to actual Moso households, lineages and the people moving between them. Just this ethnographic contribution alone will attract a broad readership to Quest for Harmony and merits it a firm place on undergraduate teaching in anthropology and China studies.

There is, though, an even larger avenue for theoretical discussion opened up by Shih's findings. Significantly, Shih points out in chapter eight that the term “harmonious” (called ho or hing in the Naru language spoken by Moso), can alternately mean “getting along well (with each other),” and therefore “is frequently used in describing the state of domestic relations” (p. 208). Among the Moso, household harmony traditionally has taken precedence over the accumulation of resources, and – as Shih states in his conclusion – preserving harmony has been the main impetus behind Moso decisions to divide a grand matrilineal household into smaller households (p. 272). The high value Moso have attributed to harmony has thus bolstered their ideology that inter-personal relations are smoothest when people live with maternal kin (rather than, say, their mothers-in-law). Conversely, their everyday lived experience in the absence of in-laws has confirmed that household harmony is maintained whenever Moso reside with just their close relatives in the mother's line.

These findings give rise to an important question for cross-cultural comparison: besides “household harmony,” what ideals might underpin the social institutions of neighbouring groups in Southwest China or further afield? Significantly, household harmony echoes the sentiment of “conviviality” which is prevalent in the ethnography of Amazonia, where people collectively downplay – or even dramatically invert – the terms and condition of being an affine/outsider to the household. I suggest that another valued notion in Southwest China would be the “fullness of life,” which holds in common with “household harmony” some salient characteristics, such as the emphasis on a life-course where people ideally becomes ancestors (or possibly reincarnated beings) who benefit the family line.

Rhetoric about the fullness of life, however, often valorizes accumulation through the marrying-in of affines, the propagation of one's own lineage and attachments to it, and the competitive amassing of heroic strength, lengthy genealogies of ancestors, etc. To give a brief example, my fieldwork among the patrilineal Nuosu (called Liangshan Yizu in Chinese) of Yunnan Province revealed that there is a mutually enhancing relation between the fullness of life and capturing resources from “outsiders” to the household and lineage (“The captive guest: spider webs of hospitality among the Nuosu of Southwest China” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, in press for 2012). In this sense, Nuosu morals surrounding the fullness of life are near-inversions of Moso morals about household harmony. And indeed, in my observation, the Nuosu emphasis on the fullness of life often led to family dynamics that fell short of being fairly called “harmonious.”

Tellingly, at the end of his book, Shih presents some very recent findings about present-day Moso, who (like the Nuosu) increasingly draw links between accumulation, the fullness of life, and the condition of being an outsider to the household. Nowadays, Shih says, as Moso profit from economic opportunities in larger Chinese society, they try to secure exclusive tisese relationships, which entail traditional residence in matrilineal grand households, coupled with new paternal obligations for child support. The Moso shift from prioritizing household harmony to prioritizing the fullness of life thus seems evident. How this social change might pan out, though, awaits confirmation from Shih's exciting new volume which, we read, will follow closely on the heels of Quest for Harmony.