Makers and Markers of Distinction: Technology and Amish Differentiation in the 1935-1936 Study of Consumer Expenditures

Plain groups differentiate themselves from the world, and from one another, by technology. It is worth recalling, however, that before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amish farmers and artisans used the same technologies as their neighbors, and were often more advanced than those around them in agricultural techniques and tools. This article examines the early development of technological differences as markers of subcultural boundaries based the massive Study of Consumer Purchases (S.C.P.) conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Bureau of Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1935 and 1936

Symposium Review of "The Amish" by Donald Kraybill, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven Nolt

Summary by Megan Bogden; Review by Steven Reschly; Review by Benjamin Zeller; Review by Tom Coletti; Authors' Reply by Donald Kraybill, Karen Johnson-Weiner, and Steven Nol

Makers and Markers of Distinction: Technology and Amish Differentiation in the 1935-1936 Study of Consumer Expenditures

Plain groups differentiate themselves from the world, and from one another, by technology. It is worth recalling, however, that before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Amish farmers and artisans used the same technologies as their neighbors, and were often more advanced than those around them in agricultural techniques and tools. This article examines the early development of technological differences as markers of subcultural boundaries based the massive Study of Consumer Purchases (S.C.P.) conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Bureau of Home Economics in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1935 and 1936

Plain Women: Gender and Ritual in the Old Order River Brethren

Review of: Plain Women: Gender and Ritual in the Old Order River Brethren. Reynolds, Margaret C

Paradigmatic Paradigm Problems: Theory Issues in Amish Studies

Scholars of Amish history and culture, and scholars of Anabaptist and Anabaptist-descent groups more generally, have not engaged consistently or productively with mainstream theoretical developments in social and cultural studies. The phrase used most often in Amish Studies, “negotiating with modernity,” has limited usefulness because of its abstractions and time restrictions. A viable alternative rises from the research and writings of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who formulated Habitus and Field as terms to theorize about the interaction of internal and external in human experience, perhaps the oldest and thorniest issue in the social sciences. Reformulated for more general use as “structuring intuition” and “structured intuition” can help, for example, historicize Amish Studies and, by extension, research on other Anabaptist groups. An example of how this might operate is provided by the history of Anabaptist and Amish agriculture from the early modern European “agricultural revolution” to the early twenty-first century. Habitus and Field enable one to describe and explain the consistencies of Amish habits of mind concerning agriculture, or their “structuring intuition,” as those habits confront and adjust to shifting economic, political, social, and cultural environments, or field as “structured intuition.” Brief examples from eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Iowa, twentieth-century Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and early twenty-first century Iowa must suffice to outline what this portable adaptation of Bourdieu might produce

Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture

Review of: " Diaspora in the Countryside: Two Mennonite Communities and Mid-Twentieth-Century Rural Disjuncture," by Royden Loewen