ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Wang learned and developed the art of calculating and budgeting, which is referred to locally as suanji. It argues that in the context of the rural household economy, economic agency is embedded in a more complicated process of social practice and, as a consequence, calculating and budgeting are as social-cultural as they are economic. The chapter focuses on a series of fieldwork visits from 1989 to 1998 to Xiajia Village, Heilongjiang Province, in northeast China. In 1975 Wang married a girl from the same village; in 1976 the couple had a son and in 1980 a daughter, thus establishing a typical family in contemporary rural China. The chapter explains in detail that villagers were motivated to engage in excessive gift-giving activities for social instead of economic concerns, because over the long term no one would receive an equal return on what he or she had given out.
