Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identities

3 Ordnung

            Ordnung The sources of Amish cohesion puzzle observers accustomed to locating group identity in formal institutions, professional job titles, and program affiliations. Ready to place people on organizational flow charts, outsiders search in vain for Amish denominational headquarters, public spokespeople, position papers, or published budget priorities. In contrast to these modern bureaucratic markers, radically decentralized Amish society embraces as its social glue something it calls Ordnung. Translated incompletely as “order,” Ordnung is the collected wisdom of past generations, combined with the commands of Scripture and insights into human nature and the workings of the natural world. Ordnung prescribes and proscribes, directing and limiting activity . Ordnung governs the particular style of clothes one puts on the morning and how one travels to work. It mandates certain activities on Sunday and labels others taboo. It counsels general virtues like humility and submission to authority, while also requiring a stubborn allegiance to God rather than to the state if the two should come into conflict. Ordnung is passed on orally and rarely written down; it is absorbed more than dictated, but it is a real presence in everyday Amish life.1 Church discipline enforces adherence to Ordnung, but Ordnung governs the manner in which church discipline itself can be carried out. As a traditional way of ordering life, Ordnung is also local in its orientation and reflects immediate and traditional sensibilities rather than generalized mandates from afar (see table .). Submitting to life monitored by Ordnung becomes a way of situating oneself in the world and in relation to others.2 It was a commitment to traditional Ordnung that gave rise to the designation Old Order Amish. Yet Ordnung is more an approach to life than a singular set of rules. If to the casual observer, Old Order people appear to be frozen relics that time forgot, closer inspection reveals a host of evolving interpretations, understandings, and developments across the Amish world. On one level, Ordnung unifies the Amish, yet in sanctioning localized tradition, Ordnung is also a source of diversity. Alongside migration and memory, approaches to Ordnung provide another way of making sense of the Amish mosaic. But Ordnung itself has a history, and understanding its evolution sheds light on today’s Amish world. Developments of the s and s and of the s and s were especially critical. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ordnung emerged as an alternative social regulator in a society bemused by individual progress and social refinement. A hundred years later, events in most Amish settlements triggered increasing Ordnung rigidity around religious matters while allowing more flexibility on technological and occupational innovation—simultaneously opening and closing possibilities for change and sparking the formation of new subgroups committed to different interpretations. These legacies all contribute to the Amish mosaic.    ,    The distinctive approach to life and faith that came to be known as the “Old Order ” emerged in the mid-s as a decided protest against social refinement and re-          . Sample Ordnung similarities and differences across Indiana settlements Proscribed in all settlements Automobile ownershp Televisions Conducting business on Sunday Men wearing neckties Attending high school Prescribed in all settlements, but differing in specifics Buggy style Women’s head coverings Proscribed or prescribed in certain settlements or districts Church services in homes: prescribed everywhere but the Salem settlement, which has a meetinghouse Married men working away from home: prohibited in Steuben County and Paoli settlements, but permitted elsewhere Access to telephone: varies by settlement and sometimes by district Farming with tractors: permitted in Kokomo for field work; permitted in Salem for moving wagons around the barn but not for field work; prohibited everywhere else ligious rationalization.3 In the nineteenth century, Amish heirs of first-wave immigrants and more recent second-wave arrivals found themselves in an America that was wrestling with the implications of political democratization, a new social mobility , and an emerging consumer economy—all of which conspired to unsettle established norms and traditional hierarchies that had long governed public life. This yeasty social mix produced a popular celebration of equality, on the one hand, and a new set of class distinctions, on the other. No longer bound by their station of birth, individuals sought to cast off tradition and create their own personas by adapting new tastes and purchasing the tools and symbols of social refinement.4 New guidebooks based on Renaissance-era Italian nobility manuals...