Calculability and Budgeting in a Household Economy: A Case Study from Rural North China

在中國東北的下岬村，一位有心的村民在二十多年中，堅持將家中的收入與開銷登記入冊，所記的內容從一盒火柴、半斤食鹽到女兒求學和兒子結婚。他被村民們尊稱為「記帳的」，並因此而在當地社會享有較高的地位。這是因為，如本文將要證明地，村民們一致公認「會算計」是確保家庭經濟繁榮發展的最重要的因素之一。算計的能力是如此重要，以至於許多父母用它來做為尋找理想的女婿或兒媳的標準，而這又反過來加強了算計在鄉村生活中的重要性。本文的第一部分略述該村民的記帳實踐，以瞭解這類帳本和記帳實踐的形式、內容和功能。在第二節，筆者將探討該村民學習記帳與預算的過程，並分析他是如何發展自己的算計能力。在鄉村社會中，算計的本領鑲嵌於一系列的文化符號之中；它是本土的道義經濟和互惠文化中的一個組成部分，而不僅僅是一種理性計算的技巧。在結論部分，筆者主張用一種文化的眼光，來分析農村道差經濟中的經濟行為和計算技巧。

In Xiajia Village, northeast China, a villager has become renowned for keeping a detailed record of every economic transaction in his household for over 20 years. These transactions range from the purchase of a match (costing two cents) to the payments for his daughter’s education-several thousand yuan over several years. Known as “the bookkeeping man,” he is widely regarded an especially gifted person by his fellow villagers and enjoys a high status in local social life. This is because, as I will show in this paper, the skill of budgeting, and by implication, the ability to calculate in general, has long been admired by villagers as one of the most important factors in the prosperity of a household economy-so much so that many parents used it as a criterion to search for the ideal daughter-in-law or son-in-law, which in turn contributes to the social significance of calculation in village life. The first part of the paper reviews the paper reviews life. The first part of the paper reviews the villager’s bookkeeping practices in an attempt to understand the format, content, and functions of his account book. Then I examine how he learned and developed the art of calculating and budgeting, which is referred to locally as suanji 算計. The skill of suanji is intertwined with folk symbolism, and it has to be learned as part of the local culture of reciprocity and moral economy. Suanji is therefore not merely a technique of budgeting and planning. In the concluding section, I argue that in the contexts of the rural household economy, economic agency is embedded in a complicated process of social practice and, as a consequence, calculating and budgeting are as social-cultural as they are economic.