his festival. Customs Cremation has been a tradition since ancient times, although burial was adopted in most Nakhi areas during the late Qing Dynasty and remains the preferred method of disposing of the dead today. Religious scriptures are chanted at the funeral ceremony to expiate the sins of the dead. Among the Nakhi in Yongning County in Yunnan and the Yanyuan County in Sichuan, there still exist remnants of the Mosuo matrilineal family structure, which was vigorously but unsuccessfully eradicated during the Communist era. As the heads of the family, a woman leaves her inheritance to her descendants either from the mother, or through her sisters and their offspring. In Nakhi society, women do most of the household and farm work, and while they keep to the kitchen when guests are present, they are essential to the household and are therefore influential in family decisions. In 2005, Kuang Jianren, a famous Chinese film script writer produced "Snow Bracelet", a film based on the life of Nakhi ethnic minorities in Yunnan. A few Nakhi men carry on the ancient Chinese tradition of hunting with falcons. This practice is rarely found in other parts of China today. Nakhi matrilineal society Nakhi from the northern region, Yongning () are known to be matrilineal and matrilocal, i.e. parentage is by the mother and all children - men and women - live in the house of the mother, from birth until death. Their family system is different from the one we know in the West since marriage - that is to say the recognition of a union of individuals by an institution - does not exist. The practice of sexual life is free between non-consanguineous adults: at night, the man goes to the woman with whom he would like to have sex, the woman being free to accept or not. Both men and women are free to have multiple partners. As a result, children do not always know their biological father. The children are raised by the inhabitants of the household, the maternal uncles assuming the role of "father" as we envision it in the West. This conception stems in part from one of their beliefs presenting the man as the rain on the grass: it serves to foster what is already there. The reproductive role of the man is thus to "water" the fetus already present in the woman. For Nakhi, hereditary characters are