This detailed description of present-day Amish life in an Indiana community is the result of field work carried out by the author in Adams County, Indiana during 1976, 1977, 1984–85, and 1988. Because the Amish do not approve of photography, sound recording, and other processes of modern technology, the text is based on written notes made following interaction in the community. The book is illustrated with detailed drawings by Eugen Bachmann, and the text is translated from the German of the original publication by John Bendix. It contains a CD of Amish hymns and folksongs.
Beginning as a brief history with a chapter on the seventeenth-century Swiss origin of the Amish community as a splinter group from the Mennonist movement, the book then describes the process of immigration from Berne, Switzerland, to Berne, Indiana. A chapter on the methodology of the study separates this historical material from the numerous following chapters that detail the results of participatory observation of everyday Amish life. The overall focus of the book is descriptive rather than analytical. The text reflects both careful observation of and deep respect for Amish beliefs and practices. Factors working in favor of good rapport with the community include the lack of an American driver’s license, their native Swiss dialect, appropriately selected gifts that were often home-made, and a stock of Swiss songs to share with the community.
The author’s search for “Old ways” bears out the concept of preservation of folk material at the periphery, since the Amish movement has been thoroughly assimilated in Switzerland yet is growing strongly in the United States as a community with a vital sense of self-identity. This study was undertaken to contextualize songs “in their natural environment,” songs that were collected earlier and are here presented on the accompanying CD. This study also serves to compare Amish lifestyles in Berne, Indiana, with traditions of the Emmentaler lifestyle.
Ethnographic recording of Amish life does present a number of difficulties. The Amish
rejection of modern innovations and technology is a matter the ethnographer must take
care with, as intentional or unintentional crossing of forbidden boundaries by community
members can result in Meidung, or “shunning,” the complete social separation of the
individual from family and community. Questionnaires cannot be used, and community
elders often are very likely to respond to questions with “I weiss es nid,” “I don’t
know,” or “I gib nüt drum,” “I don’t care about it.” John Hostetler’s foundational book
on the Amish,
This book includes a chapter, “Clothing and Hairstyles,” an important topic because Amish communities often split over doctrinal differences in this area. They visually distinguish themselves both as members of their specific community and also regarding their specific position in that community by small details of grooming and clothing style, such as hair length, width of the men’s hat brim, the number of pleats in a woman’s white bonnet, fabric color, and whether hooks and eyes, buttons, or straight pins are used to fasten clothing together.
The theme of another chapter, “Church and Work Life,” forms the core of Amish daily life. The size of Amish communities is permitted to become no larger than can be accommodated at Sunday morning service in a regular rotation of Amish homes or barns. This maintains a community that can be feasibly traversed by horse and buggy in a reasonable time and in which every person is personally acquainted. It is the church functions that bring the entire local community together for worship and a meal every other week. Special services include twice-yearly communion preparatory, communion and foot-washing services, and weddings and funerals.
Amish working life is bound by restrictions on use of pneumatic tires, electrical appliances, and tools, and is shaped by a belief that the hard work of self-sufficiency is an opportunity to teach life skills to the young. Children are respected, and expected to contribute to family work routines from young childhood onward. Boys learn the necessary skills from father, grandfather, and older brothers, as girls do from mother, grandmother, and older sisters. The educational norm for Amish children is completion of schooling through the eighth grade. “Games and Entertainment,” “Courtship and Marriage,” “Building and Living,” “Childhood and Schooling,” “Traditional Feasts,” and “Old Age, Illness and Death” complete the richly detailed and illustrated course of Amish daily life portrayed in this book.
However, the modern Amish community is not a living Currier and Ives print of rural agricultural life, and this book fails to look closely at the tensions that must arise from a doctrine of separation from the world and the practice of Meidung (shunning). The bishop of the local community has final say on what is and what is not acceptable practice. While on the whole, the Amish successfully manage transgressors within their communities, the doctrine of separation from the world combined with the final authority of the bishop must of necessity give rise to cleavages among the communities. Amish communities fall generally into three groups, depending on their degree of adherence to the conservative “old Amish” Ordnung (order). The decision to accept or forbid relationships across the boundaries of the individual community or the boundaries of larger groups such as the Beachy Amish, Stucky Mennonite, or Egli Amish communities, bears strongly on tensions arising in the everyday world from courtship, marriage, moving to a new community, finding farms and crafts for sons and daughters, and whether or not to evangelize in the practice of one’s own personal faith. These tensions directly affect daily life in the community, and a balanced view of the New Berne Amish community must include a sympathetic presentation of the difficulties as well as the pleasures.
For this reviewer, John Hostetler remains the source for a more penetrating, sympathetic, yet balanced view of Amish society, even though an Amish man traveling with his family on the South West Chief from Chicago to Flagstaff, Arizona, recently said to me: “I read his book. I don’t know where he got that stuff!” Nevertheless, I highly recommend the book under review to the reader who wants a colorful description of Amish life. Its strong points are its samples of dialect text, the thorough coverage of what the Amish do in their daily lives, the detailed drawings rendered by Eugen Bachmann, a goodly number of period illustrations from eighteenth-century iconography, the text and musical scores of Amish music, and the CD containing Amish music collected by the author. No one book can do everything to perfection, and this book does very well indeed what it set out to do.
--------
[Review length: 1128 words • Review posted on March 1, 2010]