Horse-and-Buggy Genius: Listening to Mennonites Contest the Modern World by Royden Loewen (review)

Using the methods of oral history, Royden Loewen seeks to give voice to the nearly 110,000 Mennonites in motorized Canada and Latin America who still travel in carriages. The study is not focused on transport but, rather, on the Mennonites that Loewen and his research team interviewed between 2009 and 2012, whose resistance of modernity is symbolized most publically by horse-drawn conveyance. Yet, as Loewen contests, the very visible symbols of their lives – dark clothing, flickering lanterns, and the like – can obscure for the rest of us the religiously infused world view that gives meaning to their lives. It is that inner life of the community that Loewen probes here.

Loewen and a team of associates interviewed 250 Mennonites in thirty-five communities in Canada, Mexico, Belize, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The book's subjects come from two different traditions. The Old Order Mennonites are of Swiss extraction and, since 1883, have diverged from a Mennonites mainstream that has more readily assimilated into Canadian culture. Some 8,000 of these conservatives now live in southern Ontario and a handful are in Manitoba. The much larger Old Colony Mennonite tradition has a more complex lineage running from the Russian Empire to Manitoba and then, beginning in the 1920s, to Mexico, and from there to Belize, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. Along the way, some Old Colony Mennonites gave up horse-and-buggy ways, but Loewen focuses on the 100,000 or so who have retained it. While the Old Order group has contested modernity in the shadow of Canada's industrial heartland, Old Colony Mennonites have relied on a routine of migration to flee encroaching worldliness.

The book's first two chapters detail Old Order Mennonite life as presented by community members and include a discussion of gender roles, generational succession, and conflict and conciliation. Five more chapters describe Old Colony Mennonites, including the dynamics of migration and community stability, family life and child rearing, and a fascinating inquiry into the meaning of religious, political, and racial boundaries in Latin American contexts. Notable are the interviewees' explanations of their practice of bilateral inheritance, the role of midwives and women healers, and their adaptations of agriculture to dramatically different climates. Chapter seven, "The 'Othering' of English North America," provocatively presents modern Canada (and the United States) from an Old Colony Mennonite perspective.

Clearly, Loewen has affection for his subjects. Yet the book does not shy away from topics such as sexual abuse and the impact of poverty. Old Order and Old Colony Mennonite informants are remarkably frank about their shortcomings, and while their explanations may not satisfy modern readers, it is clear that they nurture no myths of perfection. The book's preface, introduction, and conclusion offer significant methodological reflections on oral history. Loewen and his team not only followed conventional protocols, but they also needed to modify their assumptions. For example, the typical "life-story interview approach of oral history," which promises to give "the interviewee the freedom to answer within his or her cultural constraints," proved to be problematic among conservative Mennonites who resist talking about their own personal "progress … in a teleological fashion."

Loewen's oral history approach means that the book does not "emphasize social scientific theory to explain the horse-and-buggy people" but, rather, "reports on answers" that men and women gave when asked about their lives. Such an approach has many strengths, but it also discouraged Loewen from offering many of his own comparisons and contrasts of the two Mennonite groups. True, both traditions believe that "technologies must benefit the whole community, not abet the ascendency of the individual," but given the fact that these people are contesting modernity under such different circumstances, I would have welcomed a final chapter of critical analysis from Loewen that would have knit the two parts of the book – Old Order and Old Colony – together. Yet, even without such a chapter, there is...