Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Thinking about risk and trust
I recently posted a few photographs to the GEN Flickr site from my summer 2005 sojourn to China. While not specifically part of GEN research, I kept my eyes and ears open to the possibilities. At that time we were thinking about the ramifications of mobility in all its forms, so I used that lens in shaping what I was seeing. I had taken my family to Zhongdian, which the Chinese tourist machine is now calling Shangri-la, a Tibetan autonomous county. We were heading to Dali in the Bai ethnic region and chose to take the rural bus that wound its way through the back county. There I witnessed something I had only heard about from geographers and other anthropologists. The farmers were taking their grain and throwing it onto the dirt highway, waiting for trucks and buses to run over it. While they are waiting they took their flails and beat the grain. After a vehicle had passed, they ran out into the road and swept the thrashed grain to the shoulder and raked the unthrashed grain into the road. The farm families danced back and forth between the vehicles with other families down the road doing the same thing. This was a use of mobility I had not foreseen. The old phrase, "appropriate technology" came to mind. As I related this story to a geographer with long experience in Africa, he said he too had seen this in China. I asked him, "have you seen this in Africa?" "No," he responded, "they would never trust their neighbors that way...anyone could come take their grain." Indeed, trusting the drivers, trusting the neighbors, was inherent in this use of the road. It also spoke of a balance of risks. I would find it risky to dash into a working highway, even if the traffic was light by Chinese standards. But then the risk of not processing the grain in a timely fashion is not a risk I am used to weighing. What other risks am I missing from my urban American perspective?
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