Motorcycle helmets as a cultural artifact

Having been trained as a cultural anthropologist, even though I never actually did any anthropology afterward, I still find cultural changes that I notice in Vietnam of some interest.

One of these has been the universal adoption of a helmet when riding a motorbike.  Vietnam is a motorbike culture, and when cheaper motorbikes from China appeared several years ago, it was a day of liberation for the rural population.  I dare say the main form of entertainment in the big cities for young people is tooling around all over the place after work or school for a few hours.

At least it was until the coming of computer games: they now give its major competition.  Motorbikes are, in my view a much better way to organize transport in a big city that hasn't been paved over with freeways than our cars.  A couple of cars and a bus conspire and block traffic for hours; the motorbike riders maneuver in and around them and are hardly at all even delayed.

But motorbikes are deadly.  Helmets are an essential minimum, along with traffic enforcement and getting off the road the drunks and the idiots who carry more than imaginable on the bike.  (I once saw six guys, all utterly smashed, on one small Japanese bike, weaving around trying to stay up.  Fortunately, they only made it a few meters before upending.)

I remember the first time I rode as a passenger on the back of one.  I sat there and chanted, "Please let this be over" over and over, wanting to close my eyes but not daring.  Now it doesn't phase me.  Amazing what one can get used to -- but from day one I always wore a helmet -- they could be bought in Vietnam because the government was encouraging them, but no one except a few frightened foreigners used them.  It's a tropical country and helmets are a bother and hot.

But they really aren't so hot once you are moving, and they help in a population determined to keep their skin from the sun so as to be as white as possible.  Women can wear scarves and so on but men can only wear caps, and they blow off.  There was a business of recovering and selling such hats.

Now that the police seriously enforced the law and everyone is in helmets, no doubt deaths have dropped, and a lot of men no longer have in their budget buying a new hat once a week.