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JOHN KARL EVANS
The current scholarly debate on the behavior of spirits in Chinese society owes a great deal to this earlier literature. Echoing Goody, Maurice Freedman rests his claim that the ancestors are benevolent until provoked in large part on the argument that the jural emancipation of sons from their fathers' ritual and economic authority is not delayed until their deaths, but occurs more gradually once the sons attain adulthood.3 The conflicting positions of Hsu and Ahern also become more intelligible once set in this context. If the ancestors are unfailingly benevolent in West Town, it may well be because children there are rarely punished, and because a father treats a son who has married and produced children of his own as his equal.4 In Ch'i-nan, malevolent or simply capricious ancestors have been judged responsible for crippling injuries and deaths among their descendants: here, very young children are in fact routinely subjected to severe corporal and psychological punishment. What is more, for the adult male his father's death means both an end to ritual subordination and in most cases a substantial landed inheritance!75 Ch'i-nan seems, therefore, to be a community in which both explanations can be validated, and Ahern does attempt to establish a cause-effect relationship here by building upon the work of Meyer Fortes, another African anthropologist. Among the Tallensi, whose fathers literally own their children, Fortes concludes that ancestors are “a standardized and highly elaborated picture of the parents as they might appear to a young child in real life mystically omnipotent, capricious, vindictive, and yet beneficent and long-suffering; but the emphasis is far more on the persecuting than on the protecting attributes.” Careful questioning of her adult informants led Ahern to the conclusion that in Ch'i-nan as well, ascendants are not conceived to be elderly and infirm, as most were at the moment of death. Instead, they appear to their own fully grown sons and daughters as active adults in their own right, which can only mean that the perspective is that of the child.7
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There is little to be said on the subject of child-rearing in classical antiquity, but Roman fathers long exercised much the same rights over their children that Fortes witnessed among the Tallensi, and it may therefore be suggested that delayed jural